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An
article on David Garnett published in
the July/August
2011 issue of STANDPOINT magazine.
From the Introduction to THE
SAILOR'S RETURN by J. Lawrence Mitchell:
 Upon
first publication in September 1925, The
Sailor’s Return earned laudatory reviews in a wide variety
of newspapers
and weeklies. Reviewers saw it as a breakthrough, a new direction in
David
Garnett’s work; as The Scotsman phrased it, ‘it
emerges from the realm
of mere fantasy and becomes a profoundly moving tragedy.’ The
Glasgow
Evening Times assured its readers that ‘the emotional unity
is amazingly
confirmed by the unbroken tenor of his prose. It is limpid, cool, and
classic
in its precision,’ while The Empire News declared
unequivocally: ‘it is a
masterpiece.’ Defoe, Swift, Voltaire – the usual masters of satirical
prose
style – are frequently cited as models. The very substantial review by
‘Affable
Hawk’ (Desmond McCarthy) in The New Statesman lauded
Garnett as ‘first
of all a good storyteller’ and drew comparison with Hardy and
Stevenson. Edwin
Muir, in Vogue, recalled that ‘Virginia Woolf has
said of him that he is
a true storyteller as compared with Mr. Masefield, who is merely an
interesting
one.’ Some reviewers, it is true, were puzzled by the novel’s restraint
or ‘reticence’
– a term that recurs. The TLS reviewer, for
example, praised the ‘beautifully
precise writing’ but regretted that the author ‘had not shown more
courage in
revealing the precise extent of his vaguely implied satire’ – a
characteristic The
Manchester Guardian more accurately dubbed ‘satirical
slyness’. Surprisingly,
only the Nation reviewer – quite possibly Virginia
Woolf – was reminded
of Guy de Maupassant’s tale ‘Boitelle’, in which a young man with a
taste for
the exotic (as evidenced by his fascination with parrots and macaws)
cannot
overcome local prejudices when he brings home ‘a little black-skinned
maid’ and
reluctantly abandons plans to marry her. On the other side of the
Atlantic, The
Dial quickly identified the critical thrust of the novel and
its emotional
impact, admitting that it ‘moves you to tears … with the desire to
compel poor
humanity to shed its bigotry.’
Among
Garnett’s friends and acquaintances, the new
book caused quite a stir. Frances Marshall (later Partridge), then
working in
the Birrell & Garnett bookshop in Soho, wrote to tell her
brother-in-law of
the eager customer who was convinced that the story was based upon the
life of
her great uncle in the Indian Army who married ‘an Indian princess of
the
highest culture’ and retired to a little house outside Dorchester where
‘his
relations & the neighbours made themselves so disagreeable . .
. [that] she
finally pined away and died.’ And F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had credited
Garnett
with providing inspiration for the ending of Tender Is the
Night (1934),
reported flatly to his editor Maxwell Perkins: ‘the best English books
of the
fall are The Sailor’s Return by David Garnett and No
More Parades by
Ford Maddox Ford.’ Little wonder, then, that this classic tale would be
rediscovered by new generations of readers and that it would become in
time both
a ballet and a film.
(The
full Introduction extends to over 3,000 words.)
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The
Book (Back, Spine & Front cover)
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The Sailor's Return
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The Pub: The Sailors Return, East Chaldon.
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| LARRY MITCHELL is Professor of English
at
Texas A&M University, College Station, and was recently
appointed interim
Director of Cushing Memorial Library and Archives there. He served as
editor of
The Powys Journal for seven years (2001-7) and has been an ardent book
collector for many years, with a special interest in two literary
families: the
Garnetts and the Powyses. His biographical study, T. F. Powys: Aspects of a
Life, was published by Brynmill in 2005. |
“Garnett’s
immediate inspiration – for the title at
least – was ‘The Sailor’s Return’ in East Chaldon, Dorset, where he
would
sometimes stay on visits to his charismatic friend and fellow-novelist
T. F.
Powys, who had been resident in the village since 1905. Indeed, some
have
detected the influence of Powys upon Garnett’s fiction, especially in The
Sailor’s Return where Powys’s notoriously dark view of
village life seems
to be reflected.” (From the Introduction.)
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Review by Llewelyn Powys of
The Sailor's Return
by
David Garnett
New York: Alfred A.
Knopf.
Like a Clear Stream
One of Guy de
Maupassant's short
stories describes an old French peasant coming to a railway-station to
meet his
son and his son's sweetheart, only to make the startling discovery
that his
prospective daughter-in-law is a Negress. The happy pair get up into
his farm
cart and rattle away toward the family home, and the aged parent,
watching
their departure from the gate of the platform, is made to express his
peasant's surprise at so anomalous an alliance, his peasant's
discomfiture;, his
peasant's bewildered consternation, by the simple words, "Good luck to
them!" It is just such an exclamation of a countryman's inarticulate
outraged conservatism in the face of what is strange that might be
taken as the
keynote of Mr. David Garnett's latest story, which has to do with the
sudden appearance
in a Dorset village of William Targett, mariner, and his wife Tulip, a
Negress
from Africa.
Let it be
acknowledged at once that
no fault can be found with Mr. Garnett's manner of writing. It would
seem to
be impossible for this author to write badly. As in that incomparable
little
masterpiece "Lady Into Fox" and as in that less interesting, though
none the less admirable fantasy "A Man in the Zoo", this young master
never for a single moment departs from his high standard of simple but
extremely lucid English. His power of making fiction appear to be fact
he would
seem to have inherited directly from Daniel Defoe. On my soul, I feel
that he might
be a bastard of that old ruffian, perhaps by one of those aristocratic
Portuguese Ladies that Robinson Crusoe made merry with after he had
escaped
from his island. For if Defoe's imagination is the sturdier, David
Garnett's
imagination is the more refined and subtle. It may lack, and I am of
the opinion
that it does lack, that deep inspiration, like the music of waves
breaking
against blackened ledges or the sound of thunder in mountains, which
characterizes
the great passages of English prose. But on a more surface level the
thing is
unequalled in its flawless meanderings: like a clear stream, let us
say, with
sticklebacks and water boatmen casting shimmering shadows through
silver
ripples that are making their way by hedgerow and foot-bridge path,
and
thatched cottage, down and down, past meadowsweet and purple-tinted
water
mint, down to the beached margin of the sea.
But when I use
the word
"refined" or "subtle" or "aristocratic" in
connection with Mr. Garnett's work I do not mean to imply that it has
anything
precious about it. Throughout these three books one feels that one is
in the
company of an honest writer, of a writer devoid of affectations and
prejudice, of
a writer who possesses the particular kinds of spiritual generosity and
tolerance that belong to the best traditions of English literature.
In every
sentence one feels that his sympathies are in the right place - are
where Henry
Fielding's or Oliver Goldsmith's or Charles Dickens's sympathies would
be under
like circumstances.
The actual
setting of this story is,
one suspects, no other place than East Chaldon, where a hundred yards
back from
the village green a tavern stands displaying on a swinging signpost
the title
of this book. And to any one who knows this most beautiful and most
hidden away
of all Dorset villages certain passages of "The Sailor's Return" come
to his ears with the actual cawing of the rooks of Madder, with the
actual
clattering of the buckets of the old women at the well of Madder, with
the
actual tip-tap, tip-tap of the dairy-house knocker, where one goes to
fetch his
milk each afternoon through summer and winter. These particular
passages, I
say, are stored away in one's memory, together with his actual
experience of
the place, until, as can happen only with exceptional books, fact and
fiction
becomes mingled in one's mind.
Whenever David
Garnett refers to the
Negress something magnanimous in him is touched and he writes with the
utmost
delicacy. "William had called her Tulip because she had seemed to him
like that brilliant flower, swaying upon its slender, green,
cylindrical and
sappy stalk," and again portraying her when she was disguised as a boy
he
says, "His savage bones were small and delicate; one might have fancied
them light as a bird's, and, like a bird's bones, filled with air." The
mere mention of Tulip brings from him tender sentences, just as the
mere
thought of the evil spite and meanness of the village public opinion,
which he
draws "so true to life", gives to his pages a new stinging quality,
like nettles come upon unexpectedly among bluebells and pink-campions.
"Young Mr. Stingo" (the brewer who had threatened to evict Targett
from his public house because of his illicit relationship with Tulip)
"was
as much surprised as he was pleased when Mr. Cronk wrote and told him
of the
approaching marriage; for, though glad to keep his tenant, he had never
known
that vice could get such a hold on a man as to make him marry a
coloured woman
rather than part from her." Think of selecting such a name as Cronk for
the clergyman of the village! There is genius in that alone. The Rev.
Adrian
Cronk! And how truly humorous is the description of Mr. Cronk's hasty
retreat
into the ditch behind the cowshed!
"Good day,
Targett," said
the clergyman. William grinned again, turned and discovered Tulip, who
had
been eavesdropping, behind the door. There was in her face an
expression of
great alarm, mingled with relief, and, coming on her suddenly like
that,
William burst out laughing, caught her by both hands and whirled her
out onto
the doorsteps of the inn. As he did so the parson turned and looked
back, and
Tulip, catching sight of him, gave a scream and ran into the house...
William
laughed and laughed again; he found he could not stop and leaned up
again at
the door-post weakly. While he laughed the Rev. Adrian Cronk looked
about him
in terror lest he should have been seen leaving the inn. People would
think
Targett was laughing at him. The parson didn't dare to walk into the
village,
and on the spur of the moment jumped down into the ditch and crawled
behind the
carrier's cartshed... anything was preferable to walking through the
village
with that sailor laughing at him, and he was always happiest when only
the eye
of God was looking... The reverend gentleman had, of course, been
observed
taking cover, but it did not surprise either of the old women who
witnessed
it. They put his retirement behind the cartshed down to another reason,
one which
may apply to every one, irrespective of the color of his cloth. How,
too, he
hits off these villagers, these ignoble men and women who look upon
anything
out of the common, with the pale, vicious, "rafti" eyes of
frightened carnivorous sheep! When Targett and Tulip came riding back
together
after their midnight bath at the foot of the White Nore "Tulip riding
in
front with her bare feet thrust into the leathers of Harry's stirrups,
William's jacket hanging loosely in folds round her naked body, and her
wet
woolly head shining," the village people remain sullen to the sailor's
cheerful
greeting "until he turned towards them in the saddle." When Targett
rides back unexpectedly to find an angry mob at the door of the inn
demanding
that Tulip shall be given up to them, and asks with his hunting crop in
his hand
what all the nonsense is about, "he found that the crowd seemed just as
big as ever but it was composed of his friends."
The farm
laborers in the hot
cornfields had rejoiced at first to see each noble supplies of good
liquor
coming into the village, being drawn by stout horses of The Trade: "the
horses
were fat and shiny, and moved with that slightly tipsy, dancing gait
which is
the sign of all good brewery horses." Eventually the ominous
thundercloud
breaks and William Targett is murdered in a fight in his back orchard
by an
unscrupulous prize-ring "pug" hired to "beat him up."
There is real
pathos in the words
that the brave, heartbroken Tulip calls down to Targett's young brother
from
the upstairs room, "Tell the doctor William's skull is broken," she
said. "I can feel the edges of the bone," just as there is authentic
humor in the observation of the licensed retailer who succeeds Targett
when he
remarks in condoling with the Princess Gundemey of Dahomey, reduced now
to a
glasswasher called Two Lips, on the death of her husband: "A villain
like
that deserves no mercy - murdering a licensed man."
(from New York
Herald Tribune, 1925)
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* * * * *
 DAVID GARNETT (1892-1981)
was born in Brighton into a literary
family, the son of the noted publisher’s reader Edward Garnett and the
renowned
translator of Russian classics Constance Garnett. He was a friend of
numerous
literary giants of both his father’s and his own generation – Joseph
Conrad, H.
G. Wells, John Galsworthy, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, T. F. Powys
and
Sylvia Townsend Warner, as well as Virginia Woolf and others in the
Bloomsbury
Group, with whom he became intimately associated.
After
the First World War, Garnett opened a bookshop
in the heart of Bloomsbury and a few years later he joined forces with
Francis
Meynell to establish the Nonesuch Press.
His
first wife was the illustrator Rachel (Ray)
Marshall, sister of Francis Partridge, whose woodcuts adorned some of
his works
and with whom he had two sons. She died in 1940. His second marriage in
1942,
to Angelica Grant, daughter of his artist friends Duncan Grant and
Vanessa
Bell, was something of a scandale célèbre as she
was 26 years his junior
and Grant himself had once been a lover of his. They had four children
but eventually
separated, and Garnett later moved to France, where he died at Montcuq,
in the
Midi-Pyrénées.
 Garnett’s
first successful work was Lady into Fox (1922),
which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was followed by A
Man in the Zoo (1924), a tale no
less bizarre. His next novel was The Sailor’s Return
(1925), a tragic
story of racial discrimination that baffled many critics by its
objective and emotionless
tone. It is probably the first novel in the literature of Britain to
have a
black female as its heroine.
Subsequent works
included The
Grasshoppers Come (1931),
Pocahontas (1933), Aspects
of Love (1955), A Net for Venus(1959) and The Sons of the Falcon (1972).
He also wrote several books relating to the Second World War, produced
three volumes
of autobiography, and edited the letters of T. E. Lawrence, the letters
and
diaries of Dora Carrington, and the novels of Thomas Love Peacock.
Several of
Garnett’s works have been adapted, in one form or another, for stage
and
screen.
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