Foremother Poetry: an excellent anthology, Jane Dowson’s Women’s Poetry of the 1930s

Dear friends and readers,

Another in my series of foremother poet blogs, a third recommending an anthology: Jane Dowson’s Women’s Poetry of the 1930s. This anthology suggests that much as I loved Alison Light’s Forever England and Nicole Beauman’s The Greatest Profession, both on women novelists and memoirists from early to mid-20th century England, Light’s suggestion that women novelists have been ignored because they were as a whole group conservative, won’t stand up to scrutiny. In fact there were many women of the left around, and Dowson has gathered together some of the finest.

Let me briefly tell of four: First, Nancy Cunard (1896-1965). Born very rich, she became a fervent fighter “for the cause of the dispossessed” (Jane Dowson’s words).

Here is a scathing poem Cunard wrote as an address to the pilot of a plane which just bombed a Spanish village (1930s):

To Eat To-Day

They come without siren-song or any ushering
Over the usual street of man’s middle day,
Come unbelievably – abstract – beyond human vision ­
Codicils, dashes along the great Maniac speech.
“Helmeted Nuremberg, nothing,” said the people of Barcelona,
The people of Spain – “Ya lo sabemos, we have suffered all.”

Gangrene of German cross, you sirs in the ether,
Sons of Romulus, Wotan – is the mark worth the bomb?
What was in it? salt and a half-pint of olive,
Nothing else but the woman, she treasured it terribly,
Oil, for the day folks would come, refugees from Levante,
Maybe with greens … one round meal- but you killed her,
Killed four children outside, with the house, and the pregnant cat.
Heil, hand of Rome, you passed – and that is all.

I wonder – do you eat before you do these things,
Is it a cocktail or is it a pousse-cafe?
Are you sitting at mess now, saying “visibility medium …
We got the port, or near it, with half-a-dozen,” I wonder­
Or highing it yet, on the home-run to Mallorca,
Cold at 5000 up, cursing a jammed release …
“Give, it ’em, puta Madonna, here, over Arenys-
Per Bacco, it’s nearly two – bloody sandwich it’s made down there –
Aren’t we going to eat to-day, teniente? te-niente?”
Driver in the clouds fuming, fumbler unstrapping death.
You passed; hate traffics on; then the shadows fall.

On the simple earth
Five mouths less to feed to-night in Barcelona.
On the simple earth
Men tramping and raving on an edge of fear.
Another country arming, another and another behind it ­
Europe’s nerve strung like catapult, the cataclysm roaring and
swelling …
But in Spain no Perhaps, and To-morrow – in Spain, it is, Here.

A brief review of an edition of her poems; an excellent concise account of her life (Leslie M. Blume in the Huffington Post); a photo which captures something of her character in her face:

Then a novelist, Winifred Holtby (1898-1935), whose Anders Woldby and South Riding (adapted twice for mini-series on British TV), a couple of us on Women Writers Across the Ages have recently read together:

Boats in the Bay (1933)

I will take my trouble and wrap it in a blue handkerchief
And carry it down to the sea.
The sea is as smooth as silk, is as silent as glass;
It does not even whisper
Only the boats, rowed out by the girls in yellow
Ruffle its surface.
It is grey, not blue. It is flecked with boats like midges,
With happy people
Moving soundlessly over the level water

I will take my trouble and drop it into the water
It is heavy as stone and smooth as a sea-washed pebble.
It will sink under the sea, and the happy people
Will row over it quietly, ruffling the clear water
Little dark boats like midges, skimming silently
Will pass backwards and forwards, the girls singing;
They will never know that they have sailed above sorrow.
Sink heavily and lie still, lie still my trouble.

A dual life of her and Vera Brittain who was Holtby’s partner, enabling her to publish and responsible for the posthumous publication of South Riding against the fierce opposition of Holtby’s mother.

Holtby

And last for tonight Ruth Pitter’s (1897-1992) whose poetry is moving and (like Elizabeth Hands) keeps her individual life before us:

Old, Childless, Husbandless

Old, childless, husbandless, bereaved, alone,
She knew more love than any I have known –
Familiar with the sickness at its worst,
She smiled at the old woman she had nursed
So long; whose bed she shared, that she might hear
The threadbare whisper in the night of fear.
She looked, and saw the change. The dying soul
Smiled her last thanks, and passed. Then Mary stole
About the room, and did what must be done,
Unwilling, kind heart, to call anyone,
It was so late: all finished, down she lay
Beside the dead, and calmly slept till day.
Urania! what could child or husband be
More than she had, to such a one as she?

Her partner was a woman and they kept cats:

The Talking Family

With the early morning tea
Start the day’s debates.
Soon the Talking Family
Gathers, gravitates
To the largest room and bed,
That all may share in what is said. All the Cats forgather too,
With a calm delight,
Tab and ginger, long-haired blue,
Seem to think it right
That they should share to some extent
In this early parliament. Perhaps they only want a drink
(Which of course they get)
But myself I like to think
That the Cats are met
Because this animal rejoices
In the sound of human voices. What they are we do not know,
Nor what they may become.
Perhaps the thoughts that ebb and flow
In a human home
May blow to brightness the small spark
They carry through the vasty dark.’
– “Perque pruinosas tulit irtequieta tenebras”. – Ovid.

Ruth Pitter

Pitter was lower middle class in origin and wrote in a traditional style. No wonder she was ignored. Larkin remembered her and the feminist movement has helped.

And not least was Valentine Ackland (1906-69):

Communist Poem, 1935:

‘What must we do, in a country lost already,
Where already the milIs stop, already the factories
Wither inside themselves, kernels smalIing in shelIs,
(‘Fewer hands – fewer hands’) and alI the ploughed lands
Put down to grass, to bungalows, to graveyards already.

What’s in a word? Comrade, while stilI our country
Seems solid around us, rotting – but still our country.
Comrade is rude, uncouth; bandied among youths
Idle and sick perhaps, wandering with other chaps,
Standing around in what is stilI our country.’

Answer them: Over the low hilIs and the pastures
Come no more cattle, over the land no more herdsmen;
Nothing against the sky now, no stains show
Of smoke. We’re done. Only a few work on,
Against time now working to end your time.

Answer: Because the end is coming sooner
Than you allowed for, hail the end as salvation.
Watch how the plough wounds, hear the unlovely sounds
Of sirens wring the air; how everything
Labours again, cries out, and again breeds life.

Here is our life, say: Where the dismembered country
Lies, a dead foeman rises a living comrade.
Here where our day begins and your day dims
We part – announce it. And then with lightened heart
Watch life swing round, complete the revolution.

Since’s Ackland (born Mary Kathleen McCrory) is nowhere as well-known as her long-time partner, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and was herself a lesbian, Valentine Ackland, I emphasize a few salient facts which many accounts obscure or distort. Brought up Anglo-Catholic; when young, married, she left her husband, and lived a highly unconventional sexual personal life. She met Warner in 1930, with whom she lived mainly in Dorset for the rest of their lives. She initiated her and Warner’s activities in the Spanish civil war, socialist and pacifist activities. Like Nancy Cunard, Ackland wrote a series of articles for the Left Review about the deprived condition of the poor in the 1930s. The Left Review published her poetry, reviews of books about the Spanish war, and translations. With other women writers of the 1930s (Winifred Holtby, Storm Jameson, Naomi Mitchison), she also attended a Congress of Writers in Paris in 1935, and another similar congress in New York in 1939 (where a major topic was the contemporary loss of democracy). She worked actively to help Spanish Republic (driving a lorry, working at Tythrop House, a home for Spanish refugee children). She left an autobiography, For Sylvia: An Honest Account (written 1949). Late in life she became a quaker.

To use Emma Donoghue’s term in her Passions Between Women, Ackland was the female husband of the pair.

Sylvia smoking at her desk (I must write a blog for her too)

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Like Kerrigan’s, Honey’s and Paula Feldman’s anthologies, Dowson makes a strong case for publishing anthologies of women’s poetry: “‘Humming an entirely Different Tune?’: A case study of anthologies: Women’s Poetry of the 1930s.” Beyond showing how necessary, vital it is to keep women’s literature alive and in print and part of a tradition we can (ourselves as women) find, create meanings from, not be humiliated in public and then silenced by “respectable” criteria — to make women’s anthologies. Only here does the other set of highly varied complex criteria count and come forth. (AT the conference I was at the men merely sneer or refuse to recognize what you are saying as having any validity (reminding me of religious people about Darwin), or complain men suffer worse. we have to develop a separate criteria for women’s arts, be this in visual, dramatic, poetic, or novelistic art. A week or so ago I tried again on Eighteenth Century World at Yahoo: a definition presented to the group of historical fiction would simply have denied that women wrote any good historical fiction, which is patent nonsense. I tried to present the alternative criteria and some samples, but the silence that greeted my argument told me I had gotten nowhere.

I should like also in this posting about foremothers to say I’ve moved my Reveries under the Sign of Austen blog (a foremother to us all), to Word Press. This blog has its own complement of foremother poetry. My first was Caroline Bowles, an effective poet (1808-77) of blank verse, and my last blog Mary Hays, a biographer, polemicist, and feminist (1760-1843).

Ellen