Teacup Demons

By Melvin Maddocks

SCENES OF CHILDHOOD

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Viking; 177 pages; $10.95

Sylvia Townsend Warner wore the disguise of an English country gentlewoman. These essays of reminiscence that she wrote from 1936 to 1973 seem to be dressed in tweeds and sensible walking shoes, with a faint, agreeable odor of dog hovering above the pages.

In the best tradition of her genre, Warner recalls old gardens and village churches and eccentric nannies and a dotty old major, a bit the worse for duty in India, and, yes, her dogs. When she died in the Dorset village of Maiden Newton in 1978, discreet as an old teacup at the age of 84, she already passed for an Edwardian relic, inhabiting, in her own words, a "long, long ago, when there was a Tzar in Russia, and scarcely an automobile or a divorced person in Mayfair."

Those who have read any of Warner's eight volumes of short stories or six volumes of poetry or seven novels will not be deceived by her prim persona. In her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1926), she wrote with quiet fierceness of a "genteel spinster" who chooses "to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others," even if the price be a compact with the devil.

The too-casual reader of these essays who thinks he is strolling down the garden path of English whimsy will soon find his heels being nipped by demons. Like the Irish country house of Cousin Ursula, the Warner world is haunted. Exotic objects like an old sedan chair mysteriously move themselves about at night. Can it all be explained by muscular rats?

Nor are people free from odd compulsions. An otherwise impeccable butler, intolerable to the Warner family because of his ghastly smile, returns as a volunteer fireman to avenge himself with a carefully misdirected extinguisher on the house that rejected him. On an idyllic holiday in Wales, little Sylvia and a friend come terrifyingly close to burying another child in the sand. With chilling serenity the memoirist comments, "Children driven good are apt to be driven mad."

Everywhere, Warner casts her spell, literally. Her mother's ritual for boiling an egg becomes just that. In a piece on folk recipes--a pint of warm beer stirred with a hot poker will cure backache, a slab of raw beef will rub away a wart--the reporter edges deliciously close to magic herself. Even the inventory of the purple velvet handbag of Mme. Houdin, ten-year-old Sylvia's French tutor, becomes a litany of talismans to ward off disaster: smelling salts, two thimbles, a photograph of M. Houdin, the number of madame's life-insurance policy, and "a rather neglected rosary."

This little old lady of Dorset, who was an authority on Tudor church music, had an imagination that unpredictably "caught fire from facts," as she said of T.H. White in her biography of the author of The Once and Future King. Everything took on an enchanted significance for her--dragonflies, mushrooms, four-leaf clovers, bits of broken pottery. Like White, she could not walk out her back door without seeing druids and pucks and Camelot. The only child of a schoolmaster--"solitary and agnostic as a little cat"--she was a wild romantic beneath the maiden-aunt exterior that she proffered.

Her ultimate magic was the act of writing: the incantation of words. In her summary of her childhood she explained: "There was a world of things, in which everything had its name and place, and there was a world of words, in which everything came to life." Sylvia Townsend Warner never outgrew that childhood. All her long life she retained the level innocent stare that sees so much more than just innocence. This strangely sophisticated child taught herself how to describe the ordinary with precision and wonder and a certain elegance, until even an adult could see that absolutely nothing, in the end, is ordinary.

--By Melvin Maddocks

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