skygiants

For years now I've been getting Lolly Willowes out of the library on ebook as a backup every time I go on a trip and then not getting around to it and thinking 'well, next time,' but the time finally came! What a strange and evocative little book. I knew 'Sylvia Townsend Warner' and 'about witches' and it turns out that did not in any way give me a correct impression of what it would be like.

Laura, the protagonist of Lolly Willowes, is a bit odd and dreamy and extremely Uninterested In Marriage; when her father dies and she can no longer live comfortably in a big country house with him doing as she likes, she goes to live with her brother and sister-in-law and their children. The children grow up; WWI occurs; her brother and sister-in-law give up on her marrying; nothing meaningfully changes for a full half of the book, until, suddenly, twenty years later, she is struck by a sudden profound and desperate conviction that she herself must make it change, picks a random remote location, and, to the bewilderment and disapproval of her entire family, settles in the town of Great Mop, in the Chilterns, Pop. 227.

Alone for the first time in decades, she goes for long rambles and cautiously befriends her landlady and assists with physical labor and is largely unbothered by the occasional strangeness of the village. Then her nephew -- of whom she has always been quite fond -- decides it would be lovely to come stay in her little town and experience her lovely little cottagecore lifestyle and attempt to write a book, and in his presence she finds that she is somehow trapped into being Aunt Lolly again, and all the great wonder and self-discovery of her escape has become small and domesticated.

Fortunately, Satan is there to help! and so Lolly makes a deal, and becomes a witch, which sounds quite dramatic, but isn't really any more than the rest of the book; Satan is exactly part and parcel of Laura's quiet freedom in Great Mop, bounded about by all the pettiness and silliness of the rest of the world, (including a great deal of the worship of Satan). Almost certainly Sylvia Townsend Warner wasn't the first to put into words the idea that if a woman isn't what society expects then she must become a witch [laudatory] but even to this date very few I think have expressed it with such -- prosaic isn't the word, because her writing is anything but that -- let's say close attention and interest to life in attentive, miniaturized, undramatic, and often quite funny detail.

A while back, rushthatspeaks wrote a gorgeous review of T.H. White's The Goshawk that I am not even going to attempt to duplicate. But it convinced me to read the book. rushthatspeaks also suggested reading Sylvia Townsend Warner's T.H. White: A Biography first, though, which I did, and that I am going to talk about.

Okay, so you guys know I have an undignified interest in dead-author gossip. This book cannot be classified as dead-author gossip; it is a deep and complicated portrait of a man who was very clever, and very much a romantic, and often very unhappy. It is also unfairly interesting for a biography of a man who spend vast swathes of his life living as close to hermitude as possible and, as best I can tell, had one great incident of mutual passionate love in his life, and that was with his dog.

(No, seriously, the love story of T.H. White and his dog Brownie is the kind of thing 19th-century novels are made of. Brownie spies him one day in an inn, decides that he is her one true love, sneaks into his bedroom at night, abandons her former owners and follows him home. T.H. White takes her in with a sort of absent affection but mostly ignores her, bestowing most of his attention on goshawks and other avian creatures, until Brownie decides that life is not worth living if her master does not care about her and falls ill with what seems to be the canine version of Romantic Consumption. T.H. White, on the verge of losing her, realizes what a fool he has been, rushes to her side, professes love, promises never to cheat on her with hawks or falcons again; the finale from Rent plays over the imaginary soundtrack; Brownie miraculously recovers! From this point on she is the most important thing in White's life, but again, given his general habits of hermitude, she doesn't seem to have faced much competition.)

The thing is, if you've read and loved The Once and Future King, there will be no doubt in your mind that T.H. White was capable of enormous intelligence and humor and compassion. He was also a man who generally had trouble convincing himself that there was anything worthwhile about human beings at all, including himself. He was the kind of person who would temporarily adopt, feed and clothe an entire family of Italian grifters because he was bored and lonely; also the kind of person who would fly into a rage with a visiting friend because everything was not going exactly as planned in his head; also the kind of person who would bring his half-trained goshawk to the pub and hang out all night with an angry bird on his shoulder without noticing any problems with this plan. Sylvia Townsend Warner is very skilled at making you see all of this, which, aside from the fact that she's a very good writer, is what makes this an excellent biography.

So I got to know T.H. White, and then I read The Goshawk.