The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Music at Long Verney: Twenty Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Ed. Michael SteinmanJeffrey Twitchell-Waas
Sylvia Townsend Warner. The Music at Long Verney: Twenty Stories. Ed. Michael Steinman. Foreword by William Maxwell. Counterpoint, 2001. 192 pp. $24.00.
This volume gathers previously uncollected stories, which, with one exception, were all published in the New Yorker over the last three decades of Warner’s life (1893-1978). Given that Warner brought out ten collections during her lifetime and several more appeared posthumously-not to mention her novels, poetry and biography-one might expect this to be an assortment of odds and ends, so it is all the more impressive to discover the overall coherence and quality of the volume. These stories have the touch of a very sure writer who deftly presents striking situations and distinctive characters, then resists imposing a morally didactic closure, leaving them in a state of resonant irresolution (the "inside-out feeling," Warner calls it in one story). No doubt in part due to their targeted venue, Warner’s leftist politics, lesbianism, and feminism are muted. Yet throughout, what at first appear to be perfectly conventional situations and characters are cast in a subtly askew perspective. Two children whose family is moving into a new house explore the overgrown garden and unsuspectingly drive another boy from his paradise and into resentment, quietly suggesting conflicts of class and property. A traditionally minded antiques dealer observes a young woman stealing a locket from his shop, but approvingly recognizes this as an act of defiance against her priggish husband. The one early story, "Stay, Corydon, Thou Swain," is a hilarious sendup of male erotic fantasizing, and is the only piece here to employ elements of the fantastic, which Warner explores extensively elsewhere. These typically bourgeois settings and characters have a tendency to veer toward the unexpected and to make off-beat associations, rather like the manic conversation of the mother in "Maternal Devotion," whose conventional and perplexed interlocutor is an unwanted suitor who has been dumped on the mother by her daughter. These stories should augment Warner’s growing reputation as an outstanding writer of short fiction. [Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas]