I've decided that Sylvia Townsend Warner is the queen of understatement. She gives you just enough 'information' in her stories for you make of it all what you will--you can decide for yourself what it means. Those intentions or emotions are open to interpretation. So she makes the reader work just a little bit, which I like very much. I may not always know for sure what the meaning of a story is, but I can think about it and return to it. And with any writer worth her salt, the stories can be revisited and the outcomes change according to the mood of a reader and what she or he brings to it from their own experiences. So, two stories from The Music at Long Verney this weekend. Both relatively short and both small masterpieces of brevity.
"The Inside-Out" from 1972 is a story told from the perspective of two adolescent siblings, Clive and Stella, who are moving into a new house called Ullapool and set off to the garden to explore. The garden seems "endless and directionless" and when they turn back to face their house it seems a very long way off. The garden is overgrown and all the noises of the outside world that had been screened by the traffic seem somewhere just in the near distance now. The house itself is a semidetached home with its neighbor, Sorrento, right up against it yet the gardens are separated by hedges and bushes.
"Dense laurel hedges secluded them from the gardens on either side. A slimy network of bindweed hung on the Sorrento hedge like lace curtains, and strands of barbed wire ran inside it. Spiked iron railings backed the other hedge. Considering his reaction to this Clive summed it up as an inside-out feeling. You couldn't get out; nobody could get in; and you wore the feeling not quite sure whether you liked it or didn't like it. Inside-out. It depended which way you put it on."
They look for a opening to look over into the neighboring garden which is proper and manicured--so neat compared to their own. It is by surprise that they encounter their neighbor, a young boy who is their own contemporary, hidden up in a tree watching them. Although friendly overtures are made he responds with silence first and then a scowling reply of "I loathe you". Make of that what you will. I like the juxtapositions in this story--of the 'savage' garden with its polite inhabitants and the neatly manicured one with its hidden and taciturn neighbor; as well, the noise of the greater world that makes the reader think of an entirely different sort of wild than the one they are encountering. You can only wonder at the boy in the tree and feel just a tinge of sympathy since he is looking down into this 'lost paradise' which formerly offered him 'succoring shelter'. How peeved he must be now that it is closed off to him.
"Flora" written in 1977 has a wonderful sense of ironic humor to it. It reminds me in some of the details of one I read by Elizabeth Taylor (though only in small details and not in the actual plot), since it also concerns a letter written by someone important and of value to someone other than the current owner. Edward and Flora trek across a heath to visit a boorish scholar who is living in happy (for him) seclusion. "He was a short, sturdy old man with bushy eyebrows and a trimmed beard" who turns an 'unseeing eye' on Flora (who tells the story). He gets on well with Edward but not so much with Flora. As a matter of fact he cannot even get her name right. Dora, Flora, whatever.
"I was sufficiently tired by my walk to feel chilled, and, from feeling chilled, to feel intimidated. To rouse my spirits, I began to nurse rebellious thoughts."
And what delightfully (for the reader anyway) rebellious thoughts they are. Just to be contraire (a woman after my own heart) she cuts into their conversation about calligraphy (!) and asks about the lack of wastepaper basket in the room. Surely it is a necessary item to all scribes/calligraphers. What would they do with all those spoiled copies--a page with a duplicate word or "misplaced twiddle".
"I forgot my place and broke into the conversation. 'When was the wastepaper basket invented"?
"Edward emerged from calligraphy, laughed, and said, 'God knows'."
"Mr. Tilbury, too godlike for such an admission, impaled on me a glare and said, 'That would take too long to answer, young lady'."
"I realized that I had foxed them both."
Months later she returns to the cottage on an errand Edward would have approved of--to give him a letter written by a famous man that surely Mr. Tilbury would appreciate, if only he would answer the door. Alas, the cottage appears empty and the scholar is nowhere to be seen. She leaves the letter on the doorstep with the intention of returning and getting a dose of revenge in the form of a little humor and embarrassment (to our Mr. Tilbury of course), but an unsurpressed sneeze gives him away and foils her plan. This is a story you really have to read to get the full effect of the humor since her internal conversation is absolutely priceless.
"I had been summoned, slighted, left to kick my heels in the cold, while Mr. Tilbury sat warming his malevolence; and no possible revenge was in my power. Attaining the garbage bin, I gave it a kick".
How fitting, yet so unsatisfying for our Flora. But her 'rebellious thoughts' totally make this story!
Next week: "Maternal Devotion" and "An Aging Head". (I am thoroughly enjoying these stories and might have to at least pull my copy of the Virago edition of her Selected Stories, which has until now been glanced at but passed over due to its chunkiness).