SOURCE: Mulford, Wendy. “Sylvia: The Novels of the 1930s.” In This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland: Life, Letters and Politics, 1930-1951, pp. 104-34. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Mulford traces Warner's literary development throughout the 1930s.]

THE TWENTIES' NOVELS: LINKS AND PREFIGURATIONS

Writing a review of Stephen Spender and John Lehmann's anthology Poems for Spain in Life and Letters Today, Sylvia said that those who went out to fight in Spain, unlike those who had, in Owen's famous words, ‘died like cattle’ in the senseless slaughter of the First World War, died as individuals, and as ‘self-willed individuals at that. … They presented their lives … they did not offer up their opinions or their intellects.’¹ It is a statement that applies equally to the way she and Valentine lived their lives during these years.

The meaning of the individual's part in the national struggle was to be something which preoccupied her through her two major 1930s novels, and in Summer Will Show (1936) the situation of her heroine, Sophia Willougby, prefigures something of the Spanish predicament for British volunteers: Sophia also finds herself caught up in a struggle not her own, in the Paris Revolution of 1948. Only she has not gone there for a cause but to find her husband, and it is through the mechanism of personal relationships that she becomes involved in the political struggle, and finally becomes involved with Communism.

Summer Will Show is in other ways the mediating novel between Sylvia's first three novels and her major work of the late thirties and forties: it is about personal relationships, and about individuals. But it is also a novel about place, about country, and about politics. And the movement in the three major novels progresses from engagement with the individual in place and time to a broader canvas, to an attempt to engage whole social forces, and the social dynamic in which the individual plays only a small part. The progress of the novels marks, up till The Flint Anchor, where Sylvia returns to the human heart for her theme, a gradual withdrawal from character as an explanation of social change, or indeed as a sufficient explanation of how people behave. The balance shifts between people and landscape, but it is not just landscape as aesthetic or geography, but the socio-economic and political landscape too.

There was no point in Sylvia's writing career at which she specifically set out to write a political novel. As her interest in social and political reality began to predominate in her life, it surfaced in her work to shape two major and very different novels of the thirties. She had won her readership over by the skill and good humour of her story-telling, and by the lightness and elegance of her prose, and, despite her scorn for her ‘light-hearted Lolly Willowes manner’, she remained, as she commented, a ‘bourgeois stylist’² to the end of her life, to the great delight of her readers. Sylvia was eminently pleased to discover that this quality in her writing (it was her own derisory label) disarmed the critics, for despite the outspoken subject-matter of Summer Will Show, as far as the reviewers were concerned she had, she reported, kept her ‘pinafore still quite presentable’.³

In her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), she had pointed up the oppressive stupidity of the English bourgeois family in its exploitation of unmarried women. Lolly, tired of being taken for granted in the stifling dullness of her brother's family home in London, claims her independence by taking lodgings in a small village in the Chilterns, which turns out to be the heart of a coven of witches and warlocks. Lolly comes to accept the ‘profoundly indifferent ownership’⁴ of the devil, which she finds a great deal less tiresome than the obtrusive ownership of mortal men. Sylvia won herself a considerable notoriety with her spinster-heroine turned witch, and a wide readership on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the main themes in Summer Will Show, the position of women in society and the forces ranged against their independence, shows through in this first novel. When Lolly announces to her brother Henry that she is going to live in the village of Great Mop, he does not believe she can be serious. When he realises she is, his reaction is that it is impossible for her to do any such thing: ‘I cannot allow this. You are my sister. I consider you my charge. I must ask you, once for all to drop this idea. It is not sensible. Or suitable.’⁵ Lolly replies that she is forty-seven, and if she is not old enough to know what is sensible and suitable at that age, she never will be. It is not impracticable for ‘Nothing is impracticable for a single, middle-aged woman with an income of her own.’⁶

However, it turns out that her income is not what it was: Henry has halved it by speculating in the Ethiopian Development Syndicate, without, of course, telling her. Her anger at this discovery enables her to demand the remains of her inheritance and to sweep away all other opposition. The year is 1921 and, of course, had she not been single, middle-aged and middle-class, she might have whistled for her lodgings in Great Mop.

Towards the end of the novel, Lolly is telling the Devil about women's subjection in society. He proves to be a good listener. Imaginatively, through Lolly's impassioned speech, the novel encompasses hundreds of years of the drabness of women's lives, as wives, mothers, housekeepers, servants, primers-of-the-household-economy and keepers-of-everything-running-smoothly. Sylvia links together women's social subjection and their exclusion from speech, their corralling together into the world of their own ‘silly conversation’. The women are the ‘wives and sisters of respectable men, chapel members, and blacksmiths, and small farmers and Puritans’;⁷ and when the men talk, of politics, cock-fighting or mathematics, they listen. But:

It is we witches who count. … Women have such vivid imaginations, and lead such dull lives. Their pleasure in life is so soon over; they are so dependant upon others, and their dependance so soon becomes a nuisance. …

When I think of witches, I seem to see all over England, all over Europe, women living and growing old, as common as blackberries, and as unregarded … child-rearing, house-keeping, hanging washed dish-cloths on currant bushes … all the time being thrust further down into dullness. … Nothing for them except subjection and plaiting their hair. … If they could be passive and unnoticed, it wouldn't matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed. Doing, doing, doing, till mere habit scolds at them like a housewife, and rouses them up—when they might sit in their doorways and think—to be doing still!⁸

Women's knowledge and experience are not valued in themselves by Lolly; it is their exclusion from the world of men's speech and the necessity to be always cooking potatoes and servicing that she objects to. And the figure to whom she pours out her resentment is a male figure: to the devil she imparts the secrets of women's oppression, the meaning of female experience from a woman's point of view.

Her insight that women are dangerous, incalculable, extraordinary—which all women know in their hearts—is rendered in the context of the institution of a ‘white’ witchcraft that has no power to harm or destroy. It exists alongside society, but does not challenge it. Women become witches:

to show our scorn of pretending life's a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure … to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day.⁹

If witchcraft is a metaphor for the power of change in our lives, Sylvia does not allow it to disturb the cool narrative texture of her novel, or the light surface of her prose: there are clear limits to what Lolly's witchcraft entails, and where it can lead. Sylvia was quite clear that she was writing to entertain. Before anyone else, she entertained herself in her writing. Of course the recognition about claiming one's life as one's own, not to have it doled out to you by someone else or by society's fiat, is at the heart of feminism—of second-wave as much as first-wave feminism. It is about claiming back power: and perhaps one should not underestimate the subversive potential of Lolly Willowes, who showed no need of marrying, who reclaimed her name (she became Laura again in place of ‘Aunt Lolly’ once she had escaped the family) and acted on her vision of independence with sturdy and unrelenting promptness.

Maybe Lolly is not such an unprogressive model, of how to disencumber oneself of family meshes, even today; although in this novel Sylvia had not yet confronted the question of the true (economic) cost of independence for a woman as she would do in Summer Will Show, and in particular, the far greater cost of independence for a married woman, even if she were childless. Meanwhile, the reading public loved Lolly, and Sylvia's success as a novelist seemed launched.

In her next novel, Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), she makes an implicit criticism of the Anglican Church's pretensions to colonise souls, through the character of a simple-hearted and ineffectual missionary in the Polynesian Islands, Timothy Fortune. Her ‘fatally sodomitic’ missionary, as she described him to David Garnett, makes only one convert, a young boy whom he deeply loves. Lueli, the boy, remains wild and untouched at heart, and Mr Fortune has to admit his mission a failure. David Garnett was moved to tears by it.

The novel is a delightful and moving tale, full of Sylvia's characteristic relish for details of material life, most of it obtained from a volume of letters by a woman missionary which she happened upon in the Westbourne Grove branch of Paddington Public Library: Mr Fortune's equipment; how the islanders live; the leisurely, sybaritic existence; the climate; vegetation; the volcano's eruption. The whole book breathes a Utopia far from Western Puritanism and guilt, both of which Sylvia loathed, and has a strong sense of the redemptive power of love in Timothy Fortune's feeling for Lueli.

Love is also the redemptive motif of The True Heart (1929), which retells the tale of Cupid and Psyche set in the cold world of Victorian charity in Essex. As well as experimenting with narrative form, as she later explained, the novel had what she called a ‘love-interest’: it tracks the love-story of Sukey Bond, an ordinary servant-girl who is an orphan, and the half-witted son of a vicar, Eric Seaborn, and Sukey's determined effort to rescue him for herself and overcome class barriers. It is set in a marvellously evoked world of the bleak marshes, and a heartless Victorian hypocrisy and class pride as cold and bleak as they.

Each one of these first three novels has harsh things to say about the complacency, arrogance, hypocrisy and exploitation of the bourgeoisie and its institutions, especially the Church, for which Sylvia had a finely-tuned contempt bordering on loathing; but they are barbs buried beneath a light façade. It was not the social criticism which attracted her readers if they even noticed it, camouflaged in the dexterous narrative. For example, one American review of The True Heart avowed that the novel was a:

whimsical, an ironic, a touching, a quietly beautiful story enriched by prose of the first order … the story once again of a servant girl … a very quiet Victorian story … full of hidden charm, humane mirth and unforced pathos.¹⁰

Reviews of the first two novels also stressed Sylvia's delicate precision of phrasing and engaging fantasy, which said, according to the reviewer, ‘so many wise things about the human adventure’.¹¹ One of her more perceptive early reviews of The True Heart was by the American novelist Katherine Anne Porter, which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. She was not lulled by the apparent simplicity of the book's surface into believing it was merely whimsical; she described it as fantasy, but in the sense of being:

a deliberate effort to separate the reader for a moment from his ordinary mood of objectivity and set him down in a world of symbolic truths. … The whole book, in spite of a few living characters, a few credibly breathing animals … is like the changing landscape of a dream where figures move on some ageless errand.¹²

This separation of the reader from the ‘ordinary mood’, a quality of suspension of disbelief such as we experience in poetry and verse drama, is a hallmark of Sylvia's prose. The language itself works to exert subtle transformations and to people our minds with a new reality. This, to reverse the dictum Leavis made upon Hardy,¹³ is the fruit of being a poet, of working her poetic apprenticeship with her first two volumes of verse at the same time that she was creating the early novels.

SUMMER WILL SHOW

This salt of reality, this acknowledgement, even in make-believe, of the actual nature of things and beings.¹⁴

Above all, the imaginary worlds of Sylvia's novels are notable for their quality of superadded reality, the tang of things tasted, smelt, handled, known in their quiddity and in their essence. Character is set within this dense texture of material reality like a fly in amber: in Summer Will Show it is character realised from within; in After the Death of Don Juan it is character presented externally, as ‘humour’, or type, a development that was to be carried further in her 1940s novel The Corner That Held Them.

Sylvia's ability to recreate a world, whether of Great Mop in the Buckinghamshire beechwoods, a Polynesian island, the Essex marshes, or Paris in the 1840s, gives solid reality to the middle-period novels. There is a persistent tenacity and inventiveness in the realisation of their landscapes, whether of the chalk hills of Dorset, the narrow streets of working-class Paris or the harsh bony terrain of Southern Spain, which renders them at once both familiar and surprising. Part of the reason for the sense of conviction she achieves, of familiarity, may be that her characters and settings haunted her so long before she began to write.

Summer Will Show first began to haunt her in her ‘gaunt flat over the furrier in the Bayswater Rd’¹⁵ in 1920 or 1921; at that time she was involved in the Tudor Church Music project, when the character of Sophia Willoughby appeared to her—‘an early Victorian young lady of means with a secret passion for pugilism; she attended prize-fights dressed as a man and kept a punching-ball under lock and key in her dressing-room’.¹⁶ Sylvia knew her name immediately, and that she had smooth fair hair, was tall, reserved and very ladylike. (In some respects, not unlike Valentine.) The next character to appear was Minna—‘telling about the Pogrom in a Paris drawing-room and Lamartine leaning against the doorway’.¹⁷ Many years later, in 1932 or 1933, she was in Paris with Valentine ‘and in the Rue Mouffetard, outside a grocer's shop, I found that I wanted to write a novel about 1848. And Sophia and Minna started up and rushed into it.’¹⁸

The novel took four years to write, while, as she noted on the fly-leaf of Valentine's copy, they moved from Chaldon to Paris to Frankfort Manor and back to Chaldon again; she finished it at Lavenham where she went away to be alone and ‘dispatch’ it: it was a long work, 400 pages. The first 100 pages develop the character of Sophia Willougby in the setting of her Dorset estate, the fine country house of Blandamer, which has belonged to her parents and where she grew up. She is virtually estranged from her husband Frederick, who lives a profligate life in Paris in the company of a Jewish entertainer called Minna Lemuel. Sophia's life centres around her two children and her estate, and she is well-enough satisfied with it, for an absent husband is really the best of all worlds, preventing any necessity of marrying, and allowing her as much freedom as a woman can possess, through her married status, without the interference of a flesh-and-blood partner. Until, that is, her children fall ill and die of smallpox. She becomes a woman trapped by her gender and her class whose sole reason for existence has been stripped from her. The only sphere in which she can think to assert herself is to go hunting.

Meanwhile, the doctor has sent for her husband: one male to another, taking charge and organising her life. The doctor's wife is appalled at her husband interfering with Mrs Willoughby and intercepts his letter, declaring that such a one as Mrs Willoughby has no need of Mr Willoughby. But Sophia's sense of decorum is offended by this unlooked-for assistance: she might in effect discard her husband, as indeed, given his behaviour she had; she might feel herself in every way his equal, if not his superior, and indeed she did; but it was quite a different matter for anyone in Society to put such things into words—‘Such things could be done, but not said.’ Class and gender mesh, to prevent any overt challenge to the existing order: many things can be tacitly tolerated provided they are not named. As indeed, at another level, a similar process of ‘not-naming’ is at work in this novel; for the relationship that develops between the two main characters, Sophia Willoughby and Minna Lemuel, is never named as lesbian; many critics ignored the real nature of the friendship which is at the core of the novel.

To restore her position and her freedom in society, Sophia reluctantly comes to realise that she must have more children. There will be no escape for her from the ‘sentence of death pronounced’ that the young women ‘Marry, bear children, and guide the house.’ She considers having a child by the lime-kiln man, where she took her children to cure them of whooping cough, and from whom they contracted the fatal smallpox, but receives from him a bitter class rebuff. She tells him her children are dead and he retorts with a flat accusing anger listing some of the many reasons why children die—‘the smallpox, and the typhus, and the cholera … the low fever, and the quick consumption. And there's starvation. Plenty of things for children to die of.’¹⁹ When she taxes him with his lack of pity he snarls back at her:

I'm like the gentry, then. Like the parsons, and the justices, and the lords and ladies. Like that proud besom down to [sic] Blandamer. …

Plenty more children, they say, where the dead ones came from. If they die like cattle, the poor, they breed like cattle too. Plenty more children. That's what I say to you. Rich and poor can breed alike, I suppose.²⁰

Angered but speechless, Sophia withdraws. The whole scene has a curiously theatrical air. The sense of staging continues when, to replace her children, Sophia goes to Paris to find Frederick. Up to this point in the novel, Sophia's independence, limited though it is, has been buttressed by her position as Lady of Blandamer House. Because she owns the estate, its workers, servants, dependants; because everything turns for her—the footmen's calves are clothed in unwrinkled white silk, the trees are felled and pollarded, the labourers toil in the bony dusty field—her true servitude is masked. And yet without her husband and her family, she cannot ‘make her mark’: it is only through them that she can act, for ‘How should a woman satisfy her ambition except through a man?’ The question reverberates throughout the next 300 pages, and the term ‘woman's ambition’ comes to mean in Paris something rather different from what she had understood by it in Dorset. If the first section of the novel sets forth the thesis of Sophia's need for liberation from the patriarchal family, the next section supplies the antithesis of her gradual recognition of her release through another woman, while the final section of the novel supplies the synthesis in which fulfilment comes in recognition and acceptance of political commitment.

What Sophia gains in Paris is not, in the usual sense, achievement of ambition: rather she goes through a gradual, inexorable process of stripping away what she did not know she wanted to lose—her respectability, her jewels, her fine clothes, her money—all the signs of exchange that signal her to be an upper class woman. With them go the habits of mind and body and of years of conditioning. Through her relationship with Frederick's mistress, Minna, she discovers love, poetry, excitement, risk, generosity, poverty, and happiness beyond her imagining. She also discovers suffering; what it is to be a member of a victimised and exiled group.

If the character of Minna Lemuel (raconteur and unscrupulous, bewitching, ageless hostess to a tatterdemalion mixture of bourgeois artists, poseurs, intellectuals and revolutionaries on the Left Bank in Paris) had been in the back of Sylvia's mind for many years, the early 1930s was the moment for that character to ripen. Minna's Jewishness and her suffering as an exile were an important part of Sylvia's theme. By looking unsentimentally into the past, Sylvia realised in the character of Minna a part of the nightmare that gripped her contemporaries.

Sophia's first sight of Minna is as she sits in her salon recounting the tale of her Lithuanian childhood and the Jewish pogrom to a packed audience. Sophia is enthralled; Sylvia gives the narrative—with its themes of freedom, persecution, struggle, national feeling, petty oppression and the irrepressibility of the human spirit—full weight within the novel. She also uses it implicitly to point up the curious alliance of motives and classes which heralded the 1848 Commune in Paris, and to suggest from the outset some of the inherent instabilities that would contribute to its eventual downfall. The narrative is interrupted by the outbreak of the fighting which heralded the days of the Paris Commune: the concierge announces that the ‘people in the street are demanding the carriages for their barricade’.²¹

Through the medium of inserting Minna's tale into the novel, Sylvia realised the transition from the stable conventions of Dorset society to the revolutionary potential of Paris in 1848. The narrative exists perfect and entire within its own terms, set in counterpoint and tension to the discourse of the novel itself, always at the back of the reader's mind representing art's challenge to stable bourgeois societies. One of Sylvia's most perceptive critics, Eleanor Perenyi, said that this tale ‘burned in her mind’ long after the rest of the book had become dim.²² The strange poetry and intensely felt immediacy of the narrator-as-child, recalling the remote, mysterious grandeur of forest, mountains and raging torrents, the fierceness of winter's grip—the stuff of folk-tales and fairy-tales and travellers' legends of distant lands—pitches the reader as well as the salon audience out of the world of bourgeois gentility, whether of a Left-Bank Paris salon or a Dorset country estate, and creates a world of unattached possibility.

As well as pointing up the political theme of freedom and the struggle of the people of Paris against the oppressive Bourbons, the narrative opens up a space of artistic freedom in which the two women can reach each other—a space which would otherwise be closed, positioned as they are each in relation to one man, as respectively wife and mistress to Frederick. (In her first encounter with Frederick in Minna's salon, Sophia is aghast to discover she is being used as ‘his stalking horse’ so that he can bait Minna—‘her wifely petticoats the shield whence he could attach his mistress.’²³

Art ignores, shoves aside social construction: it cannot transcend it, but it can make a temporary space in which transformation can occur. That is the measure of its revolutionary significance. Immediately, Minna's tale shocks Sophia out of her Dorset-bred preoccupations: she quickly forgets that she has come to Paris to be got with child by her husband, her assumptions obliterated at one blow by the intense curiosity Minna and her performance have aroused. She reflects as she stares at Minna:

Are you the child who ran across the bloodied snow to kill the Christians? Are you the prophetess, the brooding priestess of Liberty, who spoke with such passion of the enfranchised river? Are you the woman so bitterly hated, my rival and overthrower?²⁴

Never in her life had she felt such curiosity or dreamed it possible. As though she had never opened her eyes before she stared at the averted head, the large eloquent hands, the thick, milk-coffee coloured throat that housed the siren voice. Her curiosity went beyond speculation, a thing not of the brain but in the blood. It burned in her like a furnace, with a steadfast compulsive heat that must presently catch Minna in its draught, hale her in, and devour her.²⁵

Too tired to leave Minna's apartment, Sophia falls asleep on the couch. The metaphor of desire—the steady burning heat of her curiosity about Minna, and her siren voice—are transposed in sleep as she hears: ‘Sleep, you must sleep, my beauty, my falcon’ and feels hands stroking her, ‘slowly, heavily, like the hands of sleep, stroking her hair and her brow’.²⁶ Throughout the next day that she spends in ‘passionate amity’ with her husband's mistress, she realises that she has crossed a boundary as surely as if she had renounced her position as a wife: ‘She could go anywhere, do anything. … Hers was the liberty of the fallen woman now.’²⁷

The first effect of that liberation is to enable Sophia to do precisely that which was so unthinkable in Dorset—to put her feelings, perceptions and experiences honestly into words. The effect is cathartic, but also traumatic:

Talking to Minna she supposed that she must talk herself to death as others bleed to death; …

At intervals, in some strange non-apparent way, there was food before her, and more wine in the glass, the fire built up or a lighted lamp carried into the room. Sometimes a drum rattled somewhere through the echoing streets beating the rappel, or a burst of sudden voices rose from the barricade. And with some outlying part of her brain she recognised that a revolution was going on outside.²⁸

At this stage, the revolution for Sophia is the Parisians' affair, an unreal show that is going on below Minna's balcony, from which she watches the life of the barricades in its quotidien domesticity, the men changing their trousers, washing themselves in buckets of water, the arrival of tin coffee-pots, bread and sausage in a ‘paper chemise’. It is Minna's revolution, Minna who is standing unbonneted in the street drinking to it, giving her duelling pistols to it; but not her best pair. Indeed, Sophia is so little conscious of the reality of the revolution that she proposes to take Minna out to dinner, where they discuss Frederick over fillet-steak and Beaujolais: ‘It had been an axiom of Papa's that under doubtful circumstances it was best to order Beaujolais.’²⁹ Even during a revolution the precepts of upper-class Dorset still hold sway. Sylvia's irony against the hapless but none the less dangerous husband is beautifully tempered in this exchange between wife and mistress:

‘I have not had much opportunity to muse over Frederick's domesticity for the last three years’, said Sophia.

‘No. And for part of that time I had perhaps rather too much. So you see we must both be biassed.’

‘Poor Frederick!’

‘Poor Frederick! …

However … our faulty appreciation would not trouble him. Frederick completely despises all women. I think that is why he seems so dull and ineffectual.’³⁰

Frederick asserts his revenge; to win back his wife, apparently out of pique and a sense of flouted convention, to which end he enlists the aid of Sophia's Great Aunt Leocadie, a formidable lady of Parisian Society. (The character Sylvia most enjoyed creating, ‘so detestable and so estimable … the only person on her side of the fence who had enough stuffing to be set opposite Engels.’³¹) The ploy nearly works and a reconciliation is about to be effected when Sophia discovers that Minna is starving. She returns straight to Minna and gives her all the money she has. Minna promptly puts the money in a charity box, laughing that she has beggared Sophia. The effect of the gift, and of Minna's action, is to confirm the two women's delight in each other and fasten their affections ever more closely.

At the beginning of the third section of the novel, Minna placidly comments that Sophia has finally run away: ‘I've encouraged a quantity of people to run away, but I have never seen anyone so decisively escaped as you.’³²

Once Frederick has failed to divide the two women, he has in effect lost the battle for Sophia—although the real, because economic, basis of men's power over women continues to be demonstrated throughout the novel. To be free of that power means to lose all bourgeois comforts and status; there can be no compromise.

It is at this point that Frederick attempts to reassert his ownership by beggaring Sophia: he cuts off her bank credit and confiscates her gold and jewels—all of which he is entitled to do. (The Married Women's Property Act which allowed married women to retain independent control of their own property was not passed until 1870.) Sophia is left with ‘what is left over from my ring … my clothes, for what they are worth. And my hair. I believe one can always sell one's hair. After that, unless I comply with Frederick's wishes, nothing.’³³ As Minna's friend, the Communist theoretician Ingelbrecht (based on Engels) comments, ‘It is a lock-out.’

This showdown is the catalyst for the course that Sophia's life takes from now on: it becomes clear to her that she has joined herself to Minna and become an outcast—the shock of Frederick's abuse of the woman constantly named as his ‘mistress’ confirms the wife's position on ‘the other side’. One effect of her new material position, stripped of any financial resources, is to make her a great deal more critical and sceptical of the revolutionaries for their ineffectuality: ‘Whoever else might hope to survive a year of the republic its revolutionaries certainly could not.’³⁴

There is both a shortage of work in the Commune and a shortage of food, and only the Communists appear to have a clear idea of what is happening or what to do about it. Sophia gains a grounding in the basics of material economy through talking to some of the demonstrators on a Communist march, which bears a banner with the demand ‘Bread or Lead’. Minna is horrified: the Communists, she says are dangerous. Meanwhile, Sophia's only means of gaining a living is as a kind of pavement artist, singing Sunday School hymns to accompany a young man who makes speeches against the Church and plays the accordion. But she is aware that this is no way to live. If the revolutionaries persisted in this way, they would soon all be dead of starvation.

The need to get a living rapidly transforms Sophia's perceptions of life. The necessity to buy good food cheaply develops an unsuspected side of her nature and affords unsuspected pleasures:

With her whole soul she walked from stall to stall, countering the wiles of those who sell with the wiles of those who purchase, pinching the flesh of chickens, turning over mackerel. … Her fine nostrils quivered above cheeses and sniffed into pickle-tubs and the defencelessly open bellies of long pale rabbits. …

All round her were the kind of faces she liked to see; sharp clear glances, lips taut with cupidity, brows sharply furrowed with exact thought … she tasted the rapture of being first amongst peers.³⁵

Now Sophia looks upon members of her own class as strangers, and day by day, her alignment with the ‘mauvalis sujets’, the outlaws of society, ‘who live for their own way and by their own wits’, frees her from the characteristics of her class, the whole set of false obligations imposed by ‘Society’, symbolised by the gloves which in that society one never removes. Shedding her gloves she sheds convention and prudence, and gains a sense of exhilarating happiness, the shabbier and hungrier she becomes.

The novel is free of both romanticism and sentimentality about poverty, however, for the shifts in Sophia's behaviour are noted exactly the lower down the social scale she sinks. At the same time, the novel conveys a sense of the absurd, spontaneous joy, the quite unmerited and unprepared-for delight, which springs up between two women in passionate sympathy of heart and mind. It is this, deriving clearly from the effusive joy of the relationship between herself and Valentine, which gives the book its dominant tone, a note as light and effervescent as ‘a fountain … before unsuspected and now to play for ever, prancing upwards, glittering and uncorruptible’.³⁶

In the last stage of Sophia's transformation, the unlikely Bildungsroman from heiress to humble revolutionary (when the final stage of the fighting breaks out on their street she loads guns on the barricade), it is impossible not to see something of Sylvia's own hard-headed attitude to political commitment. In the novel, she endows Sophia with similar qualities. When Ingelbrecht asks her what she would do with her peasants, she replies that one should not pity them. Then they will never get up. When a horse is down you beat it to get it up. He laughs appreciatively and says that her brains should be under a red bonnet. In the last days of the Commune, Minna and Sophia work for the Communists collecting old bell-pulls and other scrap lead for weapons, and Minna is content and happy to be thieving again: she approaches it as an art. At last, dedicated and united, they work together.

There is a sense of fusion of the all-too-temporary possibility that the Commune represented, with the happiness and mutual self-discovery of the two women; the personal interwoven into the narrative of the progress of political events through those confused months in Paris in 1848. Both personal and political are overshadowed from the start by a sense of impending doom. It is a narrative that moves inevitably forward to the destruction of love and to the failure of the revolution. Personal fulfilment is doomed to the same thwarting as the political.

For the satisfactory artistic integration of the novel, politics and life must mirror each other: Minna's gratuitous death, stabbed on the barricades by Sophia's jealous nephew Caspar, may reflect the accidental and gratuitous outcome of so much political endeavour. And yet, aesthetically, there is something profoundly unsatisfying about this neat tying-up of the plot. It is not so much the fact of Minna's death but the manner of it, for the writing at this point in the novel sinks to bathos.

Caspar, placed by Frederick in the Garde Mobile, the most brutal and feared of the forces ranged against the Republicans, leaps over the barricade on which Sophia and Minna are fighting, and when Minna recognises him and calls out, ‘her voice warm, inveterately hospitable’, he stabs her through the breast with his bayonet, shouting ‘Drab! … Jewess! this is the end of you.’³⁷ Sophia in blind fury shoots him through the mouth but is saved from execution because she is a woman, more particularly because she is a lady. Worst of all she is saved by a priest; Sophia rounds on him in fury:

how many women are dead already, and how many more will be, with your consent and complaisance? Dead in besieged towns, and towns taken by storm. Dead in insurrections and massacres. Dead of starvation, dead of the cholera that follows starvation, dead in childbed, dead in the workhouse and the hospital for venereal diseases. You are not the man to boggle at the death of a woman.

It seemed to her, and she was glad, that she had screamed this out like a virago of the streets.

But with a bow he reasserted,

‘I cannot consent to the death of a lady.’³⁸

Dramatically these last scenes are of a high-pitched operatic nature, despite the power of Sophia's rhetoric. The solid reality of life on the barricades, of the quotidian life of Sophia and Minna together, is gone. Another kind of discourse has been inserted, and obtrudes.

At the close of the novel, Sophia is immersed in reading the pamphlets which Ingelbrecht has given her to distribute—another dangerous, practical job that she has undertaken to perform for the Communists. She opens one and begins to read: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.’³⁹ It is the opening of the 1848 Communist Manifesto, and the novel ends with a fourteen line quotation from it. Sophia has moved beyond freedom and happiness, beyond personal love, into the sphere of dogged, unromantic commitment: ‘She seated herself; and leaning her elbows on the table, and sinking her head in her hands, went on reading, obdurately attentive and by degrees absorbed.’⁴⁰ More alone than ever before, the next phase in her education is about to begin: freedom is not enough.

Whether the choice of ending was influenced by external, nonartistic reasons—whether Sylvia chose to end it with Sophia alone because she wished the emphasis to fall on dedication to her chosen politics (and she was writing the end at the height of her new-found political ardour); because Minna as Jewish victim must exemplify the doom of her race; because Minna as romantic revolutionary had to be swept aside for the forces of new Communist realism represented by Sophia—is immaterial to one's sense of the novel's achievement. What is material is the fault in the realisation of Minna's death, which suggests a more deep-seated uncertainty or unease. An artistic failing of this kind in the texture of even such a long novel as Summer Will Show, when it is the work of as sophisticated and skilled an artist as Sylvia, suggests some more deeply hidden contradiction.

It seems to Sophia that her happiness, ‘blooming so late and so defiantly’ is immortal, and it is characterised for her by one of Marvell's verses which she finds on a second-hand bookstall:

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high,
It was begotten by despair
Upon impossibility.(41)

There are no obvious reasons that Sophia can see why she should love Minna; she stands for everything Sophia had been taught to shun in the world in which she grew up, ‘policed by oughts’, in which ‘one's emotions were the expression of a bargaining between demand and supply, a sort of political economy’.⁴² Minna offered but one flower, ‘liberty. … One could love her for the only sufficient reason that one chose to.’⁴³ But liberty alone is not enough: Sophia must also pursue her own free path. She must become that which she has it within herself to be. The choices at some point come to be between love, artistic freedom and serious political engagement.

There is another layer to consider. Throughout the novel, the figure of the artist is represented in the character of Minna: even the eminently respectable and shrewd Great Aunt Leocadie tells Sophia that she is ‘certainly an artist. … She tells fairy-stories and fables. It is something quite particular, a narrow talent, but perfectly cultivated.’⁴⁴—words which Sylvia might have considered applying to herself.⁴⁵ The novel, written at the height of the creative encounter between herself and Valentine, when they were collaborating on Whether a Dove or a Seagull and entering into their political commitments together, draws upon aspects of her and Valentine's relationship. If, thematically, the destruction of the two women's love in the course of the revolution acts as a paradigm of the profound reach of political events in people's personal lives, it remains the case that at the point of rendering this destruction, Sylvia's artistic nerve failed.

The contrast between the flawless articulation of the events of the pogrom in Minna's tale and the tinny realism of the barricade scene is striking: removed by historical distance and controlled by the artifice of form Sylvia could handle such moments. Placed in the immediate, and attempting to resolve the complex emotion she has generated between her two women characters, the moment of dissolution is handled in a gestural manner. It is both perfunctory and loud.

It may be that this flaw indicates her inability to engage with the emotion of loss at this stage, or sheer tiredness (she said she finished the novel ‘at a gallop’). Or it may be that there is another, unresolved sub-text concerning her own involvement in the problem of the artist's role in the revolution. If the death of Minna signifies the necessary sacrifice of the artist (as well as of personal love) in the course of the political struggle, the artistic failure here can be seen as prefiguring Sylvia's later withdrawal from overt political reality in her fiction. To shackle the artist was, for Sylvia, no solution: Minna alive was Minna free, amoral, unreliable, as Sophia at one point sadly realises, waywardly pursuing her own truth, as ‘incorruptible and effervescent as a fountain’.⁴⁶ If, in Summer Will Show, Sylvia attempted to stifle the artist in order to free the dedicated revolutionary, her unconscius was unable to consent to such a move. The death of Minna remains a botch, an unsatisfactory imposition on the artistic unity of the novel. If here the choice did lie between the artist as heroine and the revolution, it was a choice she put behind her, for in her next two novels there were to be no heroines, nor heroes.

Most of the reviewers of Summer Will Show were impressed, although Peter Quennell thought it over-elaborate and the nicety of style sometimes a drawback.⁴⁷ Many of them commented on how apposite Sylvia's 1848 setting was to current events in Spain. The Time and Tide critic, for example, felt that, despite the general prejudice against historical novels, ‘in the hands of such a gifted producer … they [the readers] will find that the world as it used to be provides not only a brilliant entertainment, but also an instructive commentary on the world as it is now.⁴⁸

But it was from the critics of the Left that Sylvia understandably received her most thoughtful and thought-provoking reaction. Ralph Wright, in his discussion of the novel in the Daily Worker, looked at the ways in which novelists on the Left were trying to reach their audiences and to communicate from a materialist and progressive standpoint. His view of Summer Will Show was that it was a work of: ‘real history—the history not only of England but of Europe in the nineteenth century. It explains the … events of the revolution seen through those very English upper-middle-class ladylike eyes … almost a stroke of genius.’⁴⁹

Wright barely notices the theme of Sophia and Minna's relationship, saying misleadingly, if with unintentional humour, that Minna and ‘the English lady, united in a common hatred of the husband, become great friends’.⁵⁰

The American neo-Communist publication New Masses and the left-radical New Republic both gave the novel warm reviews; Sylvia was delighted with this reception, and was further encouraged when, at one stage, there were plans for the Moscow-based International Literature to use it. International Literature was a prime focus for the discussion of writing sympathetic to the Soviet and Communist cause world-wide, and appeared in several European language editions, including German, French and English. In the 1930s, writers such as John Lehmann were publishing in the English-language edition: in 1936, for example, he contributed a survey of British poetry called ‘Revolutionary Poetry’. But the magazine's prime purpose was to show off the new Soviet writing and theories, particularly a good deal of social realism.

But it was the review by Eleanor Clark in New Republic which may have influenced Sylvia's thinking as she worked on After the Death of Don Juan. Clark considered Summer Will Show to be a novel of conversion, but an individualist one. She pointed out that Sophia has no relationship to the people at any point, whether in Dorset or Paris; Sylvia is concerned with showing Sophia discovering her proper freedom, a freedom that takes her logically to act as the instrument of a group acting on behalf of the people, but still not to have any relationship with those people:

For Sophia, the people are everywhere, and all, with their poverty and struggle, are for her benefit. This, if it were the end of the first chapter instead of the last, might be the story of a true conversion, in which collective activity became something more than the salvation of a private soul.⁵¹

Whether or not Sylvia took this criticism to heart, in Don Juan [After the Death of Don Juan] she attempts to portray exactly that—the collective response of the peasants of the village of Tenorio Viejo in a remote part of southern Spain, when confronted by the bungling, well-meaning projects for reform of their landlord, Don Saturno, and, finally, the outright Fascist repression of his son, Don Juan.

THE LESSONS OF COLLECTIVITY: CLASS AGAINST CLASS

Writing of After the Death of Don Juan to Nancy Cunard in 1945, Sylvia said it was:

a parable, if you like the word, or an allegory or what you will, of the political chemistry of the Spanish War, with the Don Juan—more of Molière than of Mozart—developing as the Fascist of the piece.⁵²

Sylvia felt this novel to be one of her most personal, ‘though it appears to be quite impersonal because it's written with an arid degree of satire’.⁵³ The reasons why she saw it as personal are plainly stated in the interview she gave in 1975 and are to do with the strength of her feeling for Spain:

I wrote a few articles about life in wartime Spain and got them in where I could simply as propaganda. … By that time it was getting rather hard to get in any propaganda because the English authorities and respectables were clamping down on freelance journalists who had anything to say in favour of the Republic. I had a great deal to say … I've never seen people who I admired more. I never again saw a country I loved as much as I loved Spain. A most ungainly country to love, but it's extraordinarily beautiful.⁵⁴

She loved it so much she wouldn't go back until the ‘old brute’ Franco was dead; when he finally died in 1975, she was too old. The experience of being in Spain affected her writing directly, and as a result she wrote Don Juan, ‘which is definitely a political novel—at least perhaps I should say it's a political fable.’⁵⁵ She had already written a short fable for Left Review which bore reference to Spain: another ‘The Bear’ was a Christmas present to Edgell Rickword's first wife, Jonnie, in 1939.⁵⁶

The form of the fable appealed to her: it was a form that she was to continue using throughout her life. Fable distances and depersonalises; it allows the artist to work from the impersonality of traditional form, detached from character, setting and superfluous incident. All the elements of story-telling are pared down in the fable to the essential. It exists as a form with one point, to deliver a message in an acceptable form; brevity is of its essence. In her eighties, Sylvia escaped the ‘human heart’ which, she said, she had grown weary of, and retreated to the Elfin kingdom, in which her fairy tales are another twist to the fabular form.

Sylvia had always been interested in form and was an adroit experimenter with it, whether in her poems or fiction. Fable allowed her a way of handling political themes, while taking character as given. In Summer Will Show she had taken the interweaving of individual and political development as far as she either could or wished to—and left her heroine, as Eleanor Clark pointed out, at the beginning of her struggle. In After the Death of Don Juan, she abandoned any attempt to ground action in character. Instead she focused on two opposing sets of interests and their allies, the peasants and the nobility, and in the clash of those interests and the interplay of particular types of character, realised the drama of the village of Tenorio Viejo.

The fantasy and fairy-tale elements of the earlier novels and stories remain visible throughout the whole of Sylvia's work, becoming subsumed by political purpose and transformed into fable in the middle period, and then in the late period suffering another transformation into the form of fairy-tale in The Kingdoms of Elfin (1977). Like the earlier work, this later one did have critical success, whereas, unsurprisingly, Don Juan did not. Sylvia's explanation of this failure was that the novel was published in 1938 in a small edition and was ‘swamped in the circumstances of the time’.⁵⁷ It is difficult to get a clear picture of the publishing world of late 1938 early 1939; politically, of course, it was a very uncertain time, and the fact that a high proportion of thrillers and other escapist books were produced by, for example, Penguin Books in that year, suggest that many readers were looking for lighter reading-matter. On the other hand, it was also the time that saw the publication of such serious novels as Rex Warner's The Professor, and Jack Lindsay's 1649. However, most of these books are rare today, suggesting perhaps that the print runs were small.⁵⁸

Sylvia believed that her political commitments had affected the reception of her work: ‘I usually had two or three amazingly good reviews, but I never had reviews from the sort of reviewers that sell books.’⁵⁹ It seems likely that the kind of political fable she was offering about Spain was not calculated to endear her to the literary establishment.

Was it the qualities of the fable form which alienated her readership? Certainly it is not overtly polemical and ideological—on the contrary, the novel begins as a comedy of manners; lightness of tone and acerbity of wit characterise the opening scenes set in Seville, as they take up the Don Giovanni/Don Juan story:

The death—or rather, the disappearance—of Don Juan de Tenorio took place at Seville in the seventh decade of the eighteenth century. It happened under curious circumstances. Don Juan, a renowned libertine, was paying court to Doña Ana de San Bolso y Mexia, a young lady who was already promised in marriage elsewhere. … Her father, a retired Army man, had expressed his unequivocal disapproval of Don Juan, Doña Ana too averred most steadfastly that his advances were odious to her. Nevertheless, it happened that Doña Ana was alone in the garden-court of her father's house one evening, and that Don Juan encountered her there.⁶⁰

The smooth narrative composure of this opening and the spare recital of necessary facts belong to the traditional story-teller's art, as do the discreet pointers to the satiric intention. After relating the circumstances of the death of Ana's father fighting Don Juan, the narrative continues: ‘It was expected that Don Ottavio, Doña Ana's betrothed, would avenge the Commander's death; or at any rate attempt to: Don Juan was a practised swordsman. Doña Ana, however, declared that vengeance must be the business of heaven.’⁶¹

Again, with a slight touch (the use of ‘it was expected’ and ‘however’) the underlying motives such as Don Ottavio's cowardice and Doña Ana's lust are pointed to. When Leporello, Don Juan's servant, tells his famous story of how the ‘Commander in the likeness of his statue—or the statue animated by the Commander, have it as you will’,⁶² ordered Don Juan to repent and on his refusal caused him to be dragged down to hell by demons, Ana found that ‘this demonstration of heavenly efficiency was too much for her’.⁶³ In Don Juan there are neither heroines nor heroes: Doña Ana and Don Juan are a match for each other in their shallow, senseless self-gratification, only for once Don Juan finds himself out-lusted. Concerned only with themselves, unable to see beyond the huge shapes of their vanity, they reveal their egoisms differently. Because she is a woman, Ana is objectively the less dangerous, if the more unpleasant; she cloaks her lusts in hypocrisy and in the respectability of the Church, whereas Juan, because he is a man, is in the position to unleash repression to promote his own interests.

Both Don Juan and Doña Ana are parasites on Spanish society and their enormous appetites for self-gratification cost their peasants and households dear. The serious side of the novel's theme, the ‘message’ of the political fable, concerns that cost and its outcome, which is ultimately Fascism. The novel lays bare the processes and the results of the peasantry's exploitation by the nobility, concentrating upon a small backward village in Andalucia during the visit of the Sevillean grandees to the castle.

As with Summer Will Show, the outsiders are brought in to point up the harsh reality of working-class lives. The poverty of rural Spain is seen through the eyes of the sophisticated city-dwellers as they make their journey to Don Saturno's castle, to inform him of his son's unfortunate death. They travel, curtained from the misery through which they are passing, in three coaches with seven mounted attendants and a baggage wagon, all draped in black and drawn by black mules: ‘The hammercloths were of black velvet, crape bows obscured the scutcheons, and the servants wore black liveries.’⁶⁴ The contrast with the scene outside is stark, and related in the same flat, unemphatic story-telling manner:

Over the wide estates of Andalucia small groups of peasants laboured, they looked no larger than hens scratching a poultry-yard. … Sometimes they passed the encampments which housed the labourers and their families. Only a few old women, blind or infirm, sat drowsing through the noon-day. Dogs, pigs, and infants sprawled in the road. … The stench was appalling, and the coachman had great difficulty in whipping the dogs, pigs, and children out of their path.⁶⁵

The labourers are seen as insignificant as hens, the labourers' homes are only encampments, temporary, moveable, the children rate the same lack of regard as the dogs and pigs.

The subject of the novel is Spain: it is the poverty, the harsh beauty and the secret rhythms and life of the peasants that animate it. It is love of Spain that transforms the novel, little by little, from a satire of eighteenth-century aristocrats to a fable of powerful feeling and reach about the country, centering on the peasants' concern for their land. Sylvia had always been deeply sensitive to place, and her realisation of the settings of the preceeding novels forms some of the strongest inducement to the reader's sense of the solidity of these worlds. In Don Juan she takes this process a stage further: Spain is the novel: character is withdrawn and recedes before landscape to the point at which as they function within the narrative the human figures seem like tiny ants toiling, as if seen on the huge distant plains of that country. A similar distancing occurs in some of the poems of the thirties, evoking the world of labour in the fields in Dorset, in which the worker is an insignificant figure against the sweep of inhuman nature: a trait Sylvia shares with Hardy—except that her vision is more evidently informed by political awareness.

The exploitation of one class by the other is realised through the life of Tenorio Viejo, a place so small that, as Ramon Perez, one of the leading figures amongst the peasants, says on his deathbed, when he looked for it on the map it wasn't marked: ‘I have often looked for it. It is not there, though. It is too small, I suppose. We have lived in a very small place, Diego.’⁶⁶ To which his friend replies that they have lived in Spain.

It is a village in many ways probably representative of other villages in Spain, but with a difference in that in Don Saturno it has a benevolent if ineffectual landlord. In the past he has begun progressive schemes, such as opening a school to teach the peasants to read and write. When the Sevilleans hear of this, they are deeply shocked: ‘“What repulsive sentiments”, murmured the duena to the chaplain. “He must be mad”, was the reply.’⁶⁷

Don Saturno expounds his educational theory to his visitors that the end of all education is to impart a ‘noble discontent. … In time the arts of reading and writing will force them [the peasants] to realise the wretchedness of their state and then to resent, and then, perhaps, to amend it’,⁶⁸ much as Valentine and Sylvia had hoped their book-lending scheme in Dorset would awaken the minds of their agricultural neighbours. The nobles, who realise that educating the peasants means the beginning of the end of their social order, which is based on the rule of ignorance and fear administered through the Church, are appalled. But the school is now barely used, for the money to maintain, equip it and pay the schoolmaster has not been forthcoming, for the taxes the peasants pay are used for other purposes.

Similarly, Don Saturno has experimented with land reform, so that his peasants now hold their strips on yearly leases, but it little benefits them for the land is poor and lacks irrigation. He still taxes their land heavily, to supply not only the wants of his castle, his library, astronomy and other hobbies, but above all to support Juan. In fact, the lands are heavily mortgaged and the Don is deep in debt because of his profligate son, so the peasants are no better of for their landlord's benevolent intentions.

Don Saturno had toyed with a scheme to irrigate the lands, and it is his revived interest in it, and the villagers' hope in its realisation, which forms the main dramatic thread in the events of the village, interwoven with the developments amongst the Sevillean visitors. Don Saturno, intellectual, amateur philosopher, sceptic, a man of reason deeply attached to his country and his people, is the most complex character in the novel. He is, at heart, a democrat, and the people are dear to him, but everything he touches fails miserably. Despite his loathing of his Sevillean guests, their prejudice and parasitism, of their hypocrisy, their lack of humour or any saving spark of intellectual curiosity, his fate remains inextricably entwined with theirs. Through the fate of the Don, Sylvia points out the way in which class interests align people despite their differences. At the end of the novel, by a twist of events, it is the Don whom the villagers see as the villain when the troops, summoned by his son, attack them. And it is Don Saturno who sits helplessly gagged and bound to his chair while Don Ottavio and Don Juan, linked in their common hatred of the people, direct the troops in slaughtering the peasants, for their unpardonable presumption in laying siege to the castle.

Early on in the novel, there is a long passage describing the old man's life-work of translating Aristophanes, which acts as illuminating commentary upon Sylvia's own methods and purposes in Don Juan:

Spain could have no better teacher, no more wholesome liberator, than Aristophanes. … Just as Cervantes poked fun at the romancers, so did Aristophanes deride the high-minded Euripides, and on every page there was something familiar and endearing to a Spanish heart: beef boiled with broth and a slice of the tripe, pigs and chickpeas, thyme and grapes and garlic, law-suits and wool-combing, the wineskin and old women. … And slyly, too, the lever could be inserted, and without word of offence to church or throne the power of both might be shaken by this author whose plays included so many deities and no kings.⁶⁹

But Don Saturno has no more luck in trying to get the insidious radicalism of Aristophanes performed than Sylvia had with her political novels—‘either something would be objected to on the grounds of the censorship or the actors would complain that there were no noble characters in the play’.⁷⁰

But there is a limit to the Don's concern for his peasants; it is the style of the Spanish, of his peasants, which delights him. Appreciating them aesthetically, he enjoys their company:

If they found pleasure in him, he no less was enjoying their company. Their sunburned faces bent over the chart, the severe comeliness of their wiry limbs, their melancholy magpie clothes, delighted him like beholding a work of art after walking through a gallery of simpering wax-works. The tang of their speech comforted his ears after so much polite conversation. … The Spain that he loved, pungent and austere, the Spain he studied in his library among histories, documents, charts, pedigrees, portraits and music-books: it was here in these five men talking about water; it would remain, long after his insipid and expensive puppets had gone back to their town-house.⁷¹

The passage contains the implicit criticism of the Don's position; for Don Saturno's appreciation of ‘his’ peasants is a matter of experiencing them as an art object. These same fellow human-beings which he is seeing as a work of art, he may choose not to see for months on end, while their lives are daily affected by the taxes and portions of their harvest they must give him. Their school is falling into decay and for most of the year their land is at the mercy of drought. For him it is a matter of choice whether or not he appreciates them—and it makes very little difference to the reality of their lives. Through Don Saturno, Sylvia makes a caustic indictment of the class of intellectuals and bourgeois sympathisers who do not actively align themselves with the working class by giving up their property-rights and unearned inheritance. It is the sharpest Marxist criticism in the book, directed at her own class, but it is still so lightly handled it does not disturb the even-handed satirical tone of the novel.

If Sylvia's most serious political critique was reserved for a member of the property-owning classes, her most devastating criticism of character is reserved for a woman of those classes. There is nothing whatsoever to recommend Doña Ana: she is the most unsympathetic character Sylvia ever created. Licensed by her position and fortune, Ana pursues her obsession for Juan with complete disregard of the consequences for anyone else. In the whole of Don Juan there is very little attention given to the women apart from the appalling Doña Ana—and her part in the narrative declines steadily from its early dominance until Don Juan reappears. As Sylvia switches her focus from the narrow world of the grandees to the broader canvas of the village community, with its miller, schoolteacher, priest, sacristan, labourers, and swineherds, its school, church, olive-yards, dusty streets and hovels, the women play an increasingly diminished role. They are seen, as in a Brueghel painting, composed and held in scenes of village life, washing the clothes in the river, combing the lice from their children's hair, gossiping in fragmentary glimpses from afar.

The only other woman character in the village to be individualised, and the only one given any sympathetic treatment, is the priest's housekeeper, a bony old woman called Doña Adriana, who has a scathing tongue and can prune the olive trees as well as a man. The village is an exclusively male-dominated society, in which women's voice is not heard; when the women speak what they say is scornfully dismissed by the men, saying, we shall go mad if we listen to these women. The women's words do not exist, have no rational status. They can only be admitted as part of the language of the irrational. Sylvia presents this society as it is, and the reader who knew Spain would draw the inference that in this respect, little had changed between the Spain of Charles III and the Spain of Negrin's republican Government.

As Sylvia does not hesitate to depict the sexism and the machismo of Spanish society, so she does not sentimentalise the portraits of the peasants. In their attempt to come to terms with the meaning of Don Juan's death, they ask Leporello to tell his story. The ensuing discussion, and the events which follow in connection with the irrigation scheme they so badly need, reveal the villagers in all their credulity, prejudice and ignorance. There are those who believe the story that Don Juan is dead; that now they will get the water to irrigate the land and at last be able to free themselves from the yoke of the estate, and there are those who, like Ramon Perez, do not place any credence in the story. Ramon realises that it will take more than the death of even their landlord's heir to right their wrongs, and give them control over their own land:

in a hundred years, though Don Juan will be dead, we shall not be rid of him. … We have more on our backs than the son of Don Saturno. …

More than water is needed to wash away the castle.⁷²

The pruning of the olive-yards offers a fable of the lives of the peasants and the way in which they are hampered in making any changes, for they lack the new, vigorous stock that would grow straight and strong and be productive. Their trees are old, with ‘the prolix fertility of old age, branches bushed out everywhere, weak straggling growths obliterated the original pattern of the tree’.⁷³ So, in their community, new ideas are hard to grasp, for they have been isolated and turned in on themselves for so long.

The work of pruning is slow and hard and the crop uncertain because of the drought. In the groves, they work co-operatively, and the narrative highlights the way in which, in their community, each stands by each and helps the other. The hopeless siege of the castle represents the culmination of this co-operation. As the siege draws to its crisis, Ramon Perez reflects upon his life and the lives of his fellow-men; he sees the life of man having a shape as a tree does, and with as little choice as the tree has in that shape: each man is born, grows up and lives, the pattern is simple and repetitive, there is no escaping it: ‘One grows up, one earns a livelihood, one marries a woman and begets children. As one grows older one gets tired and in the end one dies. That is the pattern of the life of man.’⁷⁴ He himself is a man of ‘certain steadfast ideas’. They are not unusual or particularly advanced ideas, but he is uncommon for the ‘steadfastness by which he lived according to his creed’.⁷⁵ (This line was inscribed by Sylvia on the flyleaf of Valentine's copy of the novel.) Life is hard, it would be better not to have been born; but since one has been born, man ‘could better [his life] and amend what he could not abolish. … The world is not so bad as we make it. … There should be justice to the poor. … Neighbour should stand by neighbour.’⁷⁶

Through Ramon Perez, Sylvia voiced the view of life that underlay her own political adherence, transposed into its simplest terms. She also implied that such a view of life, determinist and Marxist in origin, was the instinctive possession of an untutored rural community. At her clearest and most unequivocal in this part of the novel, she celebrates the values she admires in the peasants, which are the antithesis of the hypocrisy, cunning and self-interest of the Church and the landowners.

In After the Death of Don Juan, there is no talk of freedom, only of receiving one's dues, of justice to the poor man in the shape of a decent return for his hard labours. Throughout her life, Sylvia recognised justice as a key to human existence. Of those forces that stood opposed to the poor, while ostensibly on their side, and which prevented them from getting justice, time and again she attacked the Church. Although some of the villagers are sceptics and Don Saturno is an atheist, the power of the Church as an institution is still very great. No one connected with the Church emerges with any credit: the chaplain to the Sevilleans is seen to be a coward, the village priest is afraid and knows nothing of his village, barely leaving his house and near-empty church to visit it; but worst of all is the sacristan, Don Gil. Through him the novel exposes the deep connection between the Church and Fascism. It was through the Church that the sacristan acquired a hunger for power, a hunger deep, compelling and sensual; and it was through the Church that he acquired an even sweeter knowledge: power exists as a hierarchy built upon fear: ‘The tyrant he knew was afraid of a great tyrant … and behind the social order was God, the source and support of all fear.’⁷⁷

The success or failure of Don Juan in engaging the reader depends to a large extent upon their reaction to a novel without heroine or hero, and their sympathy with the political viewpoint. Don Juan is a novel in which the dominant tone of the narrative shifts markedly from high-pitched satire at the outset through a more mixed telling in the development of the tale, while it moves between castle and village to a tragic climax. While the stooges of the castle, such as the schoolmaster and sacristan, are the butts of Sylvia's malicious wit, the villagers are treated sympathetically, not satirically, and there is nothing farcical about their final predicament as they die in hopeless symbolic resistance.

The use of the fable form provides a mechanism for the implicit communication of the political standpoint, leaving the surface of the novel largely, but not wholly, free to work upon the reader at a different level. In place of psychological realism, we are given the realism of the country, of place and atmosphere; sympathy with the peasants is balanced by the satirical treatment of the grandees; and the development throughout the novel, the shift in its tone from satire to sympathy is achieved by means of the novel's two main foci, the castle and the village, each with its appropriate mode. None the less, this is not a novel to move the reader by engaging feeling through sympathy and interest in the destiny of the individual character, as did Summer Will Show. It takes its sections of Spanish society and looks at them coolly, critically, from without. Only in writing of the physical reality of the Spanish countryside and people does a warmth enter into the writing, and only at the end of her novel, with the deaths of the peasants at the hands of the troops, does Sylvia become openly partisan as a storyteller. For the most part, the novel remains what she said it was: an allegory or fable of the political chemistry of Spain.

After the Death of Don Juan appeared in late 1938 and attracted little attention, except for a few brief reviews in left-wing periodicals. Meanwhile, the Spanish war had finally ended with the victory of Fascism in March 1939, and Europe was moving inexorably towards war. There was neither time nor energy to be beginning a new novel: Sylvia and Valentine sailed for the United States in May 1939.

Notes

1. STW, review of S. Spender and J. Lehmann (eds.) (1939), in LLT 1939, pp. 101-2.

2. STW to JL, Lipton letters, 13 September 1936.

3. Ibid.

4. STW, Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman (1926). Quoted here from The Women's Press reprint, London, 1978, p. 247.

5. Ibid., p. 101.

6. Ibid., p. 102.

7. Ibid., p. 234.

8. Ibid., pp. 234-6.

9. Ibid., pp. 238-9.

10. Review by Louis Kronenburger, reference untraced.

11. The American reviews were unanimous in their lively appreciation of STW's subtlety and originality of style: her early novels were highly successful with the American reading public.

12. Katherine Anne Porter, New York Herald Tribune, February 1930.

13. In F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (London, Chatto & Windus 1932).

14. STW, review of F. Le Gros and Ida Clarke, The Adventures of the Little Pig and Other Stories, in Left News, September 1937.

15. Letters, p. 39. Since completing this book, SWS has been reprinted by Virago, with an introduction by Claire Harman.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., p. 40.

19. STW, SWS, p. 96.

20. Ibid., pp. 96-7.

21. Ibid., p. 135.

22. Eleanor Perenyi, ‘The Good Witch of the West’, review of works by STW and VA, in New York Review of Books, July 18, 1985.

23. STW, SWS, p. 143.

24. Ibid., p. 138.

25. Ibid., p. 145.

26. Ibid., pp. 150, 151.

27. Ibid., p. 156.

28. Ibid., pp. 156-7.

29. Ibid., p. 160.

30. Ibid., p. 162.

31. Letters, p. 40.

32. STW, SWS, p. 217.

33. Ibid., p. 274.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., pp. 287, 288.

36. Ibid., p. 214.

37. Ibid., p. 382.

38. Ibid., p. 390.

39. Ibid., p. 405.

40. Ibid., p. 406.

41. Marvell, ‘The Definition of Love’.

42. STW, SWS, pp. 290-1.

43. Ibid.

44. Ibid., p. 184.

45. In conversation with AT towards the end of the life, STW stressed the modesty of her art.

46. STW, SWS, p. 214.

47. Peter Quenell, New Statesman, September 1936.

48. Reviewer in T& T, September 1936, p. 1286.

49. Ralph Wright, the Daily Worker, 23 September 1936.

50. A contemporary example of this selective reading of the novel by a left-wing writer occurs in AR's otherwise excellent article ‘Plain Heart Light Tether’, in which Sophia and Minna are only named as the ‘wife’ and the ‘mistress’.

51. Eleanor Clark, New Republic, 12 August 1936.

52. STW to NC, Letters, 28 August 1945.

53. ‘STW in Conversation’, PNR 23, Vol. 8 No. 3, 1981, p. 36.

54. Ibid., p. 35.

55. Ibid.

56. STW, ‘The Bear’, PNR, 1981, pp. 48-50.

57. PNR 1981, p. 35.

58. Information courtesy of Ian Patterson Books.

59. PNR 1981, p. 36.

60. STW, After the Death of Don Juan (1938), p. 1.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., p. 2.

63. Ibid., p. 3.

64. Ibid., p. 14.

65. Ibid., p. 15.

66. Ibid., p. 301.

67. Ibid., p. 54.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid., p. 73.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid., pp. 173-4.

72. Ibid., p. 148.

73. Ibid., p. 145.

74. Ibid., p. 248.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid., pp. 248-9.

77. Ibid., p. 155.