{"title":"‘My Usual Despicable Hold on Life’: The View from Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Diaries (The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society Lecture 2021)","authors":"David Trotter","doi":"10.14324/111.444.stw.2021.10","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\nThis lecture draws on published and unpublished material from the 38 notebooks of different sizes, shapes and states of repair archived in the Dorset History Centre to argue that the richly informative diary Sylvia Townsend Warner began to keep in 1927 provides a vital resource for a fuller understanding of the fiction as well as of the life. In particular I aim to demonstrate that melancholy constitutes a defining preoccupation in both. I establish contexts for this preoccupation in Warner’s erudition and in the work of Theodore and Llewellyn Powys, while also proposing some instructive broader parallels with the contemporary writings of Walter Benjamin. Both, for example, took a strong interest in the radical Bohemian culture which flourished in Paris before and during the 1848 revolutions: Summer Will Show (1936), set in that place at that time, is my main literary text. Other expressions of melancholy examined include diary entries concerning two of the cats in Warner’s life and a hitherto unpublished poem provoked by the revival of Valentine Ackland’s affair with Elizabeth Wade White in the summer of 1949.","PeriodicalId":393913,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.stw.2021.10","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This lecture draws on published and unpublished material from the 38 notebooks of different sizes, shapes and states of repair archived in the Dorset History Centre to argue that the richly informative diary Sylvia Townsend Warner began to keep in 1927 provides a vital resource for a fuller understanding of the fiction as well as of the life. In particular I aim to demonstrate that melancholy constitutes a defining preoccupation in both. I establish contexts for this preoccupation in Warner’s erudition and in the work of Theodore and Llewellyn Powys, while also proposing some instructive broader parallels with the contemporary writings of Walter Benjamin. Both, for example, took a strong interest in the radical Bohemian culture which flourished in Paris before and during the 1848 revolutions: Summer Will Show (1936), set in that place at that time, is my main literary text. Other expressions of melancholy examined include diary entries concerning two of the cats in Warner’s life and a hitherto unpublished poem provoked by the revival of Valentine Ackland’s affair with Elizabeth Wade White in the summer of 1949.
本讲座从多塞特历史中心保存的38本不同大小,形状和修复状态的笔记本中提取了已出版和未出版的材料,以证明西尔维娅·汤森德·华纳于1927年开始保存的内容丰富的日记为更全面地了解小说和生活提供了重要的资源。我特别想证明的是,忧郁在两者中都是一种决定性的关注。我在沃纳的博学以及西奥多·波伊斯和卢埃林·波伊斯的作品中为这种关注建立了背景,同时也提出了一些与沃尔特·本雅明同时代作品的更广泛的有益的比较。例如,两人都对激进的波西米亚文化有着浓厚的兴趣,这种文化在1848年革命之前和期间在巴黎蓬勃发展:《夏日将展》(Summer Will Show, 1936)以当时的巴黎为背景,是我的主要文学作品。沃纳还研究了其他忧郁的表达方式,包括关于他生活中两只猫的日记,以及1949年夏天瓦伦丁·阿克兰与伊丽莎白·韦德·怀特的恋情重新被提起,引发了一首迄今未发表的诗。