Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life, by Frances Bingham
A N WILSON
Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life By Frances Bingham Handheld Press £15.99
One old reviewer found a tear rolling round his cheek towards the end of this book.
When the poet Valentine Ackland went into hospital with breast cancer, she wrote to her lover of 38 years, novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘Your love has never failed, and never will, life or death.’
Warner, aged 76, would sit by 60-year-old Valentine’s bed, holding her hand, and together they repeated their ‘marriage vows’ to each other.
It is the untruth, not the truth, of the declaration that prompts the tears.
Halfway through their long association, Sylvia developed a crush on an aspirant American writer, Betty White, which then turned into the raging, years-long affair between White and Valentine. When it was over, Sylvia wrote to Valentine, ‘I was WRONG. I traduced our unwavering love. I sullied our marriage’ (when she had moved out of their bedroom to allow White into it).
I lost count of the number of women in Valentine’s life, from the early schoolgirlish romances, when she was still called Molly and dressed as a girl.
Her father, a dental surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, who helped rebuild men’s faces after they’d been shot in the trenches during the First World War, was appalled by his daughter’s emotional preferences, and the two were never reconciled, even when Molly married a Catholic – not much interested in sex with women – called Richard Turpin.
(There were gasps at the wedding when it was realised that the bride had an Eton crop, even though no one knew she was continuing her affair with a woman ten years older called Bo Foster.)
One of the many torments endured by Sylvia during their long association was that, after a string of affairs, Valentine, who by now dressed as a man and enjoyed nothing better than rough shooting near the Dorset village of their dreams, reverted to Catholicism.
Sylvia found this even harder than the rivals in love, perhaps because it was the greatest possible rival in love. A huge relief all round when Valentine chucked Catholicism in favour of the Society of Friends.
Although one can imagine Valentine being a good person to get drunk with (and, since she was an alcoholic, this was never difficult), no one could envy her life partner. Valentine longed to be as famous a writer as Sylvia, who in her day was an extremely successful novelist. Sylvia trod on eggshells.
They published a volume of poetry together, but there was a simmering resentment on Valentine’s part, when she sensed Sylvia’s work being esteemed more highly than her own.
Sylvia once casually remarked that the small magazine The Countryman was going downhill, before realising the monumental tactlessness of the remark – that particular number contained one of Valentine’s poems.
Another dreadful moment was when Sylvia told a visitor, truthfully, that Valentine worked for the local doctor as a secretary and Valentine felt ‘humiliated’.
Bingham is good at chronicling the series of jobs gallantly undertaken by Valentine to keep the wolf from the door – including being a clerk to the Territorial Army during the Second World War. She chronicles the travels of the pair, and there is perhaps unconscious comedy in their time in Barcelona, during the Spanish Civil War. One of them described the city to a friend as being ‘like a fantastic Hampstead’.
With the rise of fascism, the pair – who had originally, when they got together, had the quiet, amusing aspiration to be like the Ladies of Llangollen – drifted into political allegiance. There was the inevitable membership of the Communist Party, which brought the surveillance of MI5 and, by extension, the local constabulary.
Their friend T F Powys, chronicler of bumpkin eccentrics, would surely have treasured the report of the local police sergeant. He found no ‘subversive activities of any kind… Miss Ackland is more on the active side … she drives an MG sports car, which I understand is registered in the name of Miss Warner; she also spends a considerable time at shooting rabbits for which she uses a rifle, and when at home, she more often than not wears male clothing in preference to female attire’.
As for Valentine’s poems … I wish Frances Bingham, who is a doughty champion and a good biographer, had persuaded me of their merits.
None of the lines quoted is BAD but, unlike Sylvia’s brilliant poems, they are words on a journey to becoming poetry, rather than having arrived.