The Salutation

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sewn hardback printed and bound by the Atheneum Press in blue wibalin cloth stamped in gold,with blue head and tailband.
250 numbered copies.
(Out of print).

Contents:
Introduction by Claire Harman/ Some World Far From Ours/ Early One Morning/ The Salutation/ Over the Hill/ A Parting gift/ Perdita/ How to Succeed in Life/ The Son/ A Moral Ending/ This Our Brother/ The Holy War/ The Maze/ Elinor Barley/ The Best Bed/ Emily
Short stories.

The Salutation is one of Sylvia Townsend Warner's most sought after books, if only for the long title novella which is a sequel to her classic novel Mr Fortune's Maggot. It contains another long novella, "Elinor Barley", which "out-Hardys" Thomas Hardy, and a number of short stories which had been previously published in limited editions.

Genres: Short Stories

255 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1932

About the author

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic childhood in rural Devonshire, but was strongly affected by her father's death.

She moved to London and worked in a munitions factory at the outbreak of World War I. She was friendly with a number of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s. Her first major success was the novel Lolly Willowes. In 1923 Warner met T. F. Powys whose writing influenced her own and whose work she in turn encouraged. It was at T.F. Powys' house in 1930 that Warner first met Valentine Ackland, a young poet. The two women fell in love and settled at Frome Vauchurch in Dorset. Alarmed by the growing threat of fascism, they were active in the Communist Party of Great Britain, and visited Spain on behalf of the Red Cross during the Civil War. They lived together from 1930 until Ackland's death in 1969. Warner's political engagement continued for the rest of her life, even after her disillusionment with communism. She died on 1 May 1978.

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full Disclosure: The edition I read is bundled with the edition of Mr. Fortune's Maggot published by the NYRB.

Wow.

I have to read this novella again. It's a sequel to Mr. Fortune's Maggot but you don't have to have read that book to follow what's going on. In fact, as the protagonist is never identified as Timothy Fortune, only someone who had read that novel would recognize him. It's been 12 years since Timothy left the island of Fanua and his closest friend, Lueli, voluntarily giving up "happiness" because he recognized that remaining with his friend would destroy it in the end. Now we find him wandering into the Argentine pampas, looking to find "sorrow." Physically and mentally exhausted, he collapses at the gates of The House of the Salutation and is taken in by its mistress, Angustias Bailey, the Spanish widow of an Englishman. He slowly recovers and becomes Angustias' companion, though not in a sexual way. Warner here doesn't want to explore sexual relationships but rather where can you go when you've given up everything that had meaning in your life.

And I think - mind you, I think - the answer is "nowhere."

Which isn't necessarily as bleak as it sounds. At The Salutation, Timothy finds a measure of quietude and contentment that makes life bearable if not happy.

Into this situation comes Angustias' grandson (and heir), Alfredo. Timothy instantly recognizes the boy's hostility and anger and prepares to leave. Before he can, however, Angustias has a confrontation with her servants and Alfredo (who resent the Englishman's presence and, in Alfredo's case, his possible usurpation of his inheritance). She dismisses the servants, and (the house being empty for the moment) takes her grandson and Timothy to town to stay in a hotel. On the ride into town, there's an accident...and that's when it appears that everything (at least from Alfredo's first appearance) has been a dream.

The story ends when Timothy comes down from his bedroom and Angustias tells him that her grandson is coming to visit, but his dream is gone and "as a bubble...utters a little gasp...at being ended, he felt, exhaling from him, a sigh of thankfulness that a responsibility was lifted from the uneasy soul, dismissed again for a while into its limitations of flesh and blood" (p. 227 of the NYRB edition).

As usual, Warner's prose is rich, powerful, slyly humorous and almost effortlessly carries you along to the end. And while I grapple with what this story means to me, I'll leave you with a few examples that caught my eye:

"All around the house, for miles and miles and miles, though there was no ear to hear it, a continuous small sound existed - the crackle of the ripened sunflower seeds breaking from their envelopes. On all sides the land travelled smoothly to the sky-line. To the eastward it was a pale silvery gold, to the westward, dun. The vegetation was so close and even that it had the appearance of turf - ony where the road ran did the eye relinquish the hallucination, realising the height of the summer growth. Moving slowly through that growth the backs of the cattle appeared as porpoises lolling on the ocean surface.

"...and Angustias had always been a good sleeper. She practised sleep, indeed, with such mastery that she had a repertory of different slumbers which she could command at will, slumbers ranging from the slight gauze of inattention suitable for sermons and too prolonged explanations to the quilted oblivion fit for a winter's night.

"It is only for a week or two that a broken chair or a door off its hinges is recognised for such. Soon, imperceptibly, it changes its character, and becomes the chair which is always left in the corner, the door which does not shut. A pin, fastening a torn valence, rusts itself into the texture of the stuff, is irremovable; the cracked dessert plate and the stewpan with a hole in it, set aside until the man who rivets and solders should chance to come that way, become part of the dresser, are taken down and dusted and put back; and when the man arrives no one remembers them as things in need of repair. Five large keys rest inside the best soup-tureen, scrupulously preserved though no one knows what it was they once opened; and the pastry-cutter is there too, little missed, for the teacup without a handle has taken its place. For a few days the current of household life checks at obstacles such as these, but soon it hollows itself another channel, and flows around them unperturbed.

and,

"For this sorrow that he had brought with him like some splendid garment closed and crumpled in a chest became, in that moment of wearing, more than a garment. It became alive, as though he had been given to wear some vast trailing-winged butterfly whose wings, still crumpled and discoloured from the chrysalis in which they had slept, were only just beginning to quiver and expand. Here, then, he must sit, mute, anonymous, dwindled to a speck, to a shrivelled cradle, while perched on him his sorrow might sun itself, quiver and expand and deepen the sombre magnificence of its colours."