I’m going to write a bit here first about a book you are unlikely to read. This of course poses a problem for you as a reader: why bother reading about a book that will have likely no place in your life? That question, though, is one that lurks beneath a lot of what I am going to write here. How do we choose — as readers and also as writers — which texts to give our time and attention to?
The book in question here, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s story collection More Joy in Heaven, is one you are primarily unlikely to read because it is difficult to get ahold of — the only edition I know of was printed in 1935 in England and not many copies seem to have survived to today. I got mine through interlibrary loan. If you have access to a library with ILL, or you happen to have access to one of the few libraries that owns the book, then the option to read it is available to you. But I still don’t think you will, unless you are an obsessive completist and have already read every other work of fiction by Sylvia Townsend Warner. In fact, that’s just about the only condition under which I would recommend taking the time to read it. Otherwise, why not just read something more substantial and consequential, by Warner or by somebody else?
What makes for minor work by a major writer? What value might it have to literary history? When are we better off not bothering with it?
These are questions important for anybody interested in literary history. Vastly more books have been published than any person can read in a lifetime, even a speed reader. Far more good books have been published than most of us will ever get to. Franco Moretti famously approached this problem with the idea of “distant reading”. What are literary scholars to do when the number of the objects of their study overwhelms any possibility of doing such study? How do you understand the literature of a particular era if you are only familiar with the most famous and long-lasting? How do you speak authoritatively about a strain of literature if you do not know the ephemera of that literature?
This becomes especially challenging with prolific writers. Studying 19th Century poets who died at 19 after writing only in Latin is do-able. When I began working on Virginia Woolf, I very much envied such a scholar of the obscure and short-lasting, since not only did I have Woolf’s large body of work to make my way through, I also had a body of secondary literature that made Woolf’s oeuvre look tiny.
Scholars of Sylvia Townsend Warner have found a way through the challenge of reading her entire body of work: they don’t. (Scholars of Woolf do the same. They tend to focus on the novels plus A Room of One’s Own and maybe Three Guineas, leaving the short stories and essays relatively neglected. But I know Woolf scholars who’ve never read The Years, which was one of my own motivations to study it.) Warner scholars almost completely ignore More Joy in Heaven, and the few mentions of it that I’ve found in anything about Warner are passing glances.
Now having read the book myself, I cannot say this is entirely a bad choice. Yet it is unfortunate, because Warner went to the effort of putting the book together, The Cresset Press went to the effort of printing and selling it, and if Warner is of interest, shouldn’t this book be of interest?
For a general reader, no. There is simply no argument for reading this book if you have not yet read all of Warner’s other fiction. It’s not that the stories are bad, but rather that overall they lack the energy and vividness of Warner’s better work. They all still have at least a couple sentences of wit, surprise, or beauty, and none of them feel especially burdensome to read — they have the clarity of character and scene that Warner’s other fiction displays. But still, they are minor. If anything can be said about them generally, it is that they are almost all too efficient to develop a satisfying sense of texture and depth.
However, despite all I’ve said, for a Warner scholar or for someone who has read deeply in Warner’s oeuvre a good case could be made for reading this book — mostly because if you can locate a copy, it’s a pretty quick read. I’m a slow reader and yet read it easily in three mornings.
Recently, I finally finished reading a novel by a writer I generally like, a prolific writer whose novels are significantly less artistically successful than, I think, his short stories. (Ramsey Campbell, for the curious; the novel was Ancient Images from 1989.) The book took me all summer to slog through, even though it’s only 300 pages or so. It starts well, has an excellent premise at first, gets bogged down, then shifts direction, flops around like a dying fish, and then stops. I was angry at the end because I had wasted so much time reading this book that offered nothing aside from generally well-written sentences (Campbell’s one of the more fluent and literate writers of horror). It was especially annoying because the premise at the beginning was so fun — the quest for a lost and apparently cursed movie starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi — but then Campbell seemed to lose interest in it all, the movie turns out to be almost a red herring, and the book then becomes a kind of bland quasi-Wicker Man thing. It’s not a bad book, exactly, but it is a waste of time and attention. I never felt that way about More Joy in Heaven.
That’s what distinguishes, I suppose, an unnecessary book from a minor book: one does not resent having read a minor book, as the demands it makes are not far beyond the effort and time we give to it.
Only one of the stories in Warner’s collection seems to me an outright failure: “Blood Royal”, a story about various academics’ quest to meet and befriend a mysterious philosopher. Like Ancient Images, it has an intriguing premise that the writer seemingly lost interest in before finishing. In Warner’s case, the story reads like a first draft that she gave up on. There’s a twist at the end (the person claiming to be the philosopher is actually the Tsarevich. This revelation leads virtually nowhere and adds up to just about nothing. Still, there are some fun moments, such as when the newly-revealed Tsarevich says: “I must preserve my skin, gentlemen — the frail vessel of my sacred blood. The world is still too rough for me, I must await in retirement the coming of a more enlightened age, true peace on earth and the abolition of all motor traffic.”)
The best story in More Joy in Heaven is the one that feels most fully developed: “Celia”, the tale of a minister’s daughter who goes to live with a family of “freethinkers” who have the peculiar ideology of hating virginity. They are portrayed with real affection, which makes the tragic outcome emotionally affecting, and the story’s reversal, caused by the tragedy, resonant. Like many of the stories in the book, it ends with a skeptical view of marriage, a sense that too many marriages are marred by religion or some other ideological obstacle that keeps people from seeing each other as human beings. Which is not to say Warner is advocating spinsterhood or bachelordom. None of the stories in the book portray singleness as anything other than lonely doom. It’s a pessimistic book overall, but the lightness of the stories’ telling keeps them from feeling stultifying.
The best marriage in the book comes in one of the more interesting stories, one that deserves a bit of notice: “The Democrat’s Daughter”, a work of historical fiction about Lucy, daughter of Charles, 3rd Earl of Stanhope. A footnote at the end of the story says, “Of Lucy … nothing is recorded, save that in 1796, being then sixteen, she married an apothecary in Sevenoaks.” Didn’t just marry, but eloped, as Warner’s story details, imagining the circumstances of why, the challenges of transgressing lines of class and propriety. It’s a nice little tale, not especially surprising, but it shows Warner’s interest in thinking about the women’s stories that escape the records of history. (In this, she had much in common with Virginia Woolf.)
Also of interest is the very short story “Try There”, about an imperious woman traveling with her cousin and his wife. She gets thirsty and demands they stop for water somewhere, so they find a little house with a sign on it inscribed, “The Wee Waif Café”. She goes in, the place seems uninhabited, she has some strange and unsettling experiences, so she leaves, gets in the car, and realizes there is no way to convey to her cousin and his wife what caused her fear. It’s a strange little story, more than a little reminiscent of Shirley Jackson and Robert Aickman, but not as well developed as their best work. Still, it would be worth someone digging up for an anthology of weird stories.
The title story (and first in the book) offers a tale of a 17-year-old prostitute who recommends to her layabout boyfriend that he check out the local church, since it’s pretty and he can hang out there without being under anybody’s feet. He does, but unfortunately for her he also gets some religion, which teaches him that she is a sinner and he has to leave her, so he does. Clearly, she got the better deal! Again, the story could use more development, but it’s striking how unsentimental and unjaundiced the presentation of Pinkie, the prostitute character, remains from beginning to end. Given her Communist Party inclinations, Warner would, I expect, likely embrace the new preference for calling folks like Pinkie sex workers. The story certainly portrays her that way, though I think mostly the purpose was to tell a tale of how hollow are the Church’s teachings of compassion and forgiveness.
“The Property of a Lady” is another story where Warner’s interest in class politics — and sympathy for the underclasses — is front and center. It’s the story of an elderly woman who retires from service to wealthier women. She soon realizes how invisible she is to the world, how empty are gestures of friendship from her former employers, and she decides to trangress a bit by doing some shoplifting. She is saddened to discover, though, that she is quite successful at shoplifting — an old woman of her class is so invisible as to be unable even to get questioned, never mind arrested, for filling her bag with goods from a store.
“The Nosegay” also tells a story of a lonely woman, in this case one who thinks of the small bouquets she makes (nosegays) as refined and valued works of art when the daughter of a woman she respects asks for one for a dance she’s going to. The flower artist never learns what we learn as Warner shifts the POV: the daughter thinks the bouquets are sad and ugly, but wants one as a model for a real florist to use as an example of a truly Victorian sort of folk art that can then be turned into something more fashionable and valued.
“A Village Death” is a short, sad tale of a bachelor shepherd who gets cancer and has nobody to take care of him except the wife of the keeper at the inn where he often has his meals. His ill health causes customers to flee, the innkeeper’s wife gets sick from worry as the business struggles, and the shepherd ends up in an infirmary for the destitute, finally dying, while the people of the village think of him, if they think of him at all, as a good man who is now out of his misery.
“Sixpence” is the final story in the book, another tale of marriage, this time between a postman and a young woman who repeatedly stops him on his rounds, to the point of harassment, seeking a letter from South America. Eventually, he discovers he’s in love with her, and they marry, and sometime afterward a letter does arrive for her from South America, the postman steams it open, and finds it to be a passionate love letter. He reseals it and gives it to his wife, but she, thinking he hasn’t read it, pretends the letter is not what it is, and suddenly distrust is introduced into the marriage and the man becomes something of a bully, using his wife’s lie to justify his patriarchal behavior. The story reads like an idea that hasn’t quite found its characters. It’s an unfortunate choice to end with, as it’s one of the weaker stories in the book. In fact, its predecessor is the book’s weakest story, “Blood Royal”, so if you read the book in order it will be especially unsatisfying.
Even the best stories here don’t compare with Warner’s best work in other books. During the 1930s, she seems to have saved most of her creative energies for her novels. It wasn’t really until after World War II that she developed into a great writer of short fiction, and especially so once she gave up writing novels, making stories her primary creative outlet. She also benefitted from having William Maxwell as her editor at The New Yorker, an exceptionally smart but also highly sympathetic reader, one she liked to please and impress.
While I can’t make a case for reprinting More Joy in Heaven on its own, I think a case can be made for a volume of Warner’s early stories: the ones collected in The Salutation (maybe minus the title novella, which is available in the NYRB Mr. Fortune volume), More Joy, and A Garland of Straw, certainly, though I’d be inclined to want to include The Museum of Cheats and the newly-uncovered stories in English Climate as well, since that would bring us up through the war. (It skips over The Cat’s Cradle-Book, but that’s currently back in print, and an argument could be made that it is a complete work unto itself, not a collection of stories in the same way that the other books are.) Such a book would really show Warner’s development as a writer. In the introduction to the 2000 Tartarus Press edition of The Salutation, Claire Harman points out how uneven the book is; that’s the case with all Warner’s early collections, though with A Garland of Straw she really did take something of a leap forward in consistency.
The virtue of a “collected stories” as opposed to a “selected stories” is that the reader expects inconsistency. With a writer as prolific as Warner, of course there are duds, but they’re interesting in how and why they are duds, and what they show of her changing ideas, influences, techniques, interests,and skills.
With a writer like Carol Emshwhiller, we desperately need a smart selection from across her entire career, because new readers are not likely to discover her otherwise — and she is a writer absolutely deserving constant rediscovery; but with Warner (whose later collections are still available, and for whom there was a fairly good Selected Stories released some years ago, out of print now but available at many libraries and not especially expensive from used book dealers) we need some big collections so we can really look at the scope of her achievement with the short story form. She was, simply, one of the most accomplished writers of that form in the 20th century. More Joy in Heaven is minor Warner, it is not an especially compelling book on its own, but it does not deserve the total neglect it has received for nearly 90 years.
