Sylvia Townsend Warner Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927

My hands are not beautiful, my dear. They were once, but now they are spoiled, like most of the rest of me. I say most; for by some strange mercy my sensitiveness has remained unbattered. I can give you that without self-reproach or sighing. But I am not good enough for you, Valentine, and there are moments when I wonder if it would not be better that I should go away, like Mister Fortune, leaving you with love. But I can’t. Even though the wonder were certainty I don’t think I could. I have so little strength left, except to love you. Instead, I have been walking about in Kensington Gardens, visiting the trees that have been kind to my old distress and bewilderment.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, letter to Valentine Ackland, October 14, 1930

52

Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner has followed “Lolly Willowes with MR. FORTUNE’S MAGGOT (Chatto and Windus, 7s net). The surprise which was so cleverly concealed in her first story is here wanting; yet, though the narration of this moral tale is straightforward the details of Mr Fortune’s life upon the imaginary Raratongan island of Fanua, where dwelt no other white men and where the natives, so the Archdeacon said, were like children, light and immoral. Mister Fortune’s maggot, presumably, was that he had the power of converting such people; and the result of his three years’ sojourn was that, while he lost his beliefs, he learned one or two of the profound truths about a man’s relationship to all that lies outside him.

For a great deal of the book, however, our pleasure is provided simply by Miss Warner’s brilliant, simple, comic and slightly satirical narration of all that happened to modest and painstaking Mister Fortune from the moment when, with stores, harmonium and a silver teapot, he does embarked on the impossibly idyllic island where the air was “sleeping with salt and honey, and the sharp wild cries of the wild birds seem to float like fragments of coloured paper upon the monotonous background of breaking waves and falling cataract.” As he knelt at his first prayer before the chosen altar-stone in front of his hut, one convert seemingly was sent to him. The beautiful and incalculable boy Lueli, who lived with Mr Fortune in a beautiful mutual attachment, listened to his rambling instruction – which

53

would divert from Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem upon a donkey to a description of the sands at Westonsuper-Mare – was rapt by the strains of the harmonium, taught his teacher to swim and even consented to wear the home-made trousers unwisely confected by Mr Fortune at the Archdeacon’s suggestion, garments still more unwisely snatched off and entered into by Lueli’s capacious mother. Lueli furnished him with all the mental exercise that he needed. For Lueli was discovered to have a wooden God, for whom he picked flowers, like all his kindred. This was Mr Fortune’s crisis. He ordered Lueli to burn his God, and as he wrestled with him in the spirit an earthquake shook the island, set Mr Fortune’s thatch on fire, and pinned him beneath his harmonium. Lueli saved him and took him up the mountain, from where they saw the extinct volcano break into fiery life again; but Lueli’s God was burnt, and Lueli thenceforward went as one condemned to death. Faced with a real and pressing problem in soul-saving, Mr Fortune taxed his ingenuity to the utmost. Every diversion he could think of failed; and when in a culmination of comedy he hit on the idea of teaching Lueli mathematics – the mensuration of the tree and the mathematical description of an umbrella are triumphs of Miss Warner’s – Lueli deliberately dived to death in a deep pool. He is saved, but, while his fate is apparently settled, Mr Fortune’s reflections point the moral. “How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it about!” And, so, with Lueli restored, Mr Fortune sees that he must leave his heaven upon earth lest, in his love, he infects it with death. The element of unreality is here throughout, but it does not matter, because the story is a fable; and few fables contain characters as beautifully drawn as that of Mr Fortune. Most of all, we praise Miss Warner’s touch, its lightness and its virtuosity.

Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 1927

Sylvia Townsend Warner Brings “Robinson Crusoe” Up to Date

Last year with “Lolly Willowes,” Sylvia Townsend Warner attracted much favorable comment with a curious study of a maiden aunt. There was a simplicity about her writing that was misleading. In the short, compact history of Lolly, with its casual air, there was a wealth of life. On the surface there was all the appearance of tranquillity, but seemingly without varying her chaste manner of writing, Miss Warner ended her history by showing the dormant eruptive fires in Lolly breaking into flame. The result was a grotesque and oddly beautiful short novel. At that time it wasn’t yet clear

54

that this was Miss Warner’s attitude toward the world at large. The reappearance of this same manner – or approach to character – and point of view in “Mr Fortune’s Maggot” makes it now apparent.

In her new short novel Miss Warner has turned to a man whose life in his early and middle years is as uneventful as was that of Lolly. She quickly sketches in the background with a few light strokes and introduces us to a picturesque chapter in his development. This is also a tale of awakening “fires under the Andes.” This episode of Mr Fortune’s savors of the beckoning romance that lures us to find escape from the everydayness of things. Here again is that far-of island that figures so much in daydreams and literature. Here is the world of a tropical island basking under fair blue skies, where there is uninterrupted leisure and contentment. And here we have man aping his own dream, for the maggot of Mr Fortune is nothing more than the realisation of his “nonsensical or perverse fancy.”

Briefly, “Mr Fortune’s Maggot” is “Robinson Crusoe” brought up to date. For years Timothy Fortune has been a clerk in the Hornsey branch of Lloyds Bank. He had worked and spent the usual holidays after the English fashion. It didn’t satisfy him. He longed for the peace of quietism. After years, when he finally inherited some money, he left the bank and became a missionary. At the isle of St Fabien, which was a mission headquarters in the South Sea, he was found to be the only man proficient at keeping the books. This, however, was not what he had come to the East for. He was released after a time, upon his request, to go among the Polynesians of Fanua Island.

The natives welcomed his arrival and helped him repair and make ready his hut. He had come provisioned for a year with a sewing machine, teapot, lamp and harmonium.

The Archdeacon of St Fabien had pointed out to him the characteristics of the islands – given to dancing and singing and wearing flowers – and of course immoral – for the Rarotongan language had no words for either chastity or gratitude. With the arrival of Mr Fortune began the mocking joke and gentle irony that follow his attempts to practice and convert the islanders to Christianity.

Before Mr Fortune had made little more than one attempt to speak to the islanders in a body, he acquired a convert, because for some reason he attracted the fancy of Lueli. Lueli became Mr Fortune’s man Friday. Lueli was one of the most popular youths of the islanders, gracious, handsome, indolent and carefree. Between Mr Fortune and Lueli they developed a bond of friendship that held them united in affection, until several years later Mr Fortune was bitterly to understand that the pleasure of their association was keeping Lueli from fulfilling his place in the life of the island for a time, though, his life had the serenity of an idyll. He taught religion to Lueli and found the beauty of the island enchanting. . .

55

Mr Fortune came more and more under the influence of the seductive spell of his lovely island. He didn’t go native, for he had “housewifely mind.” But the importance of civilised ways disappeared beyond his horizon. He observed that in the main, though the islanders weren’t Christians and would have no traffic with his idea of God beyond listening politely and slipping away at the first opportunity, they knew how to live happily under their own conditions. . .

The writings of Miss Warner are paradoxical in quality and in substance. Using an artificial medium –an adaptation of the comedy of manners – she makes it unusually flexible. Mind takes an eighteenth-century slant at life and yet there is a finally restrained and delicate feeling for its lyrical elements. Her style is both witty and delicate – almost brittle – and yet when she looses in her pages the vital force that motivates action, it is projected with a potent suggestiveness. This is the more surprising as the sensibilities have been recorded with such fine receptivity. Mr Fortune is a delightful joke, to her, yet he is never without her sympathy.

Certainly, it was a Puckish nature that chose to let Mr Fortune probe his heart in such alien surroundings. The contrast implicit in this stolid product of the English public schools attempting to direct a gracious Polynesian boy in the way of the faith, only to lose his own way, to suffer emotional and intellectual doubts, was a conception aided by a searching humor. The fine selection of details and incidents are evidence of exquisite craftsmanship. Miss Warner has chosen a sensitive theme – viewing it with humor – made it more susceptible – and two hours she had at least carried off without offending, or even invading, cherished beliefs.

“Mr Fortune’s Maggot” is an engaging fantasy, which says many wise things about the human adventure. So many of the good things of life exist in the odd companionship of Lueli and Mr Fortune that one enjoys a precarious satisfaction in reading of them stop “Mr Fortune’s Maggot” is an omitted chapter from the realistic studies of the commonplace that so many English novelists have written and that here is given flight and has gone winging off beyond the sunrise. It gives Mr Fortune his wish and then leaves him, almost as before, with wonderment.

Edwin Clark, New York Times, April 10, 1927

56

57

A PLEASANT PAIR

Miss (or is it Mrs?) Sylvia Townsend Warner has followed up that very successful book “Lolly Willowes” with “Mr Fortune’s Maggot.” It is a difficult book to criticise, for it never seems to settle into any definite key. Much of it is in the nature of light and deft satire on missionary enthusiasm; all very much to the point, all gracefully amusing, but castigation, surely, of a dead or dying horse? One would like to take it all as satire and whimsy, but one cannot resist the conviction that the author becomes, by spurts, rather died actively serious in pointing a moral; which moral seems to be that it is foolish to interfere with anybody else’s God or gods, and downright wicked to destroy them. Granted! I suppose there are still people who are not aware of that salutary truth, and perhaps it is as well that they should be admonished. The fluctuations of method and tone leave one in considerable doubt as to what Miss Warner is really at; yet one reads with pleasure, for the sake of the novelty and whimsy cavity which this book contains in no less degree than “Lolly Willowes.” There are also many passages of excellent serious writing, reflective and descriptive. So far as there is a story, it concerns only two characters – Mr Fortune, missionary, sometime bankclerk, and Lueli , his only convert –who, tragically, turns out not to be a convert, but secretly to bow down toward and stone. Hence those tears.

The Sketch, May 18, 1927

APPEALING STORY OF THE

SOUTH SEAS

Sylvia Townsend Warner, the authoress of “Lolly Willowes," has written another book more appealing than the first. Its title, “Mr. Fortune's Maggot,” is not attractive till we read the definition from the New English Dictionary on the first page. “Maggot, whimsical or perverse fancy, crochet.” The story is simple. “Rev. Timothy Fortune was a bank clerk, but he had not liked it, and when his godmother, whose passbook he kept, died and left him £1,000, he went to a training college, was ordained, and quitted England for St. Fabien, a port on an island of the Raratongan Archipelago, the Pacific.” He worked there without any recorded incidents for ten years, and left it in the new mission launch for the small remote island of Panua, to settle there — perhaps for life. He stayed there for three years and failed make single convert, though thought he had made one in a boy with the beautiful name of Lueli.

The charm of the book, which is very great, lies in the description of the island, and of the life of its people, their lighthearted innocence and simplicity, their imperturbable ways, and Mr. Fortune’s ways in it; they listen his

58

preaching, but make no response, everyone has his own idol and clings it. Mr. Fortune thinks Lueli, to whom he becomes very attached, has become a Christian, and has given up his idol, but finds out by accident that this is not so. The boy has been playing a double game — if so hard a word can applied to such a simple nature — “feigning to be a Christian, and in secret in the reality of secretness worshipping an idol.”

Mr. Fortune tries in vain to make him destroy it, an earthquake intervenes, awakes into life a long slumbering volcano, which leads to the burning of Mr. Fortune’s hut and all its contents, including the wooden idol. Lueli is inconsolable and here in her description of Mr. Fortune’s endeavours to divert his pupil Miss Warner is at her best; she is perfectly delightful in every mood; among other distractions, the teaching of elementary geometry is tried, and the mixture of truth and nonsense found in the now more or less defunct definitions of Euclid is most amusing.

The end of the book is very moving, nothing consoles Lueli or makes up to him for his loss. Mr. Fortune is distraught, carves for him another wooden god, and leaves the island with the loss of his own faith.

Miss Warner has a most happy insight into the music and power of language; by her works she has thrown great charm round her imaginary island and its people. Whether she is expressing a great depth of feeling or just touching upon a lighter side of life her phrases, though often unusual, are never inadequate, nor unhelpful to what she is wishing to portray.

Western Morning News, June 6, 1927

It may be that the author of this book thought to arouse curiosity by the title. I venture to think that most folk, however, will be unfortunately put off by it, so perhaps I had better inform readers of this column that a maggot is “a whimsical or perverse fancy” and not a creeping thing. Those who like a really whimsical story and who enjoy humorous satire will enjoy this book, though I confess not to be among the number. The Rev. Timothy Fortune is a missionary in the South Pacific Islands, attached to the Mission of St. Fabian, a former public school boy and a member of Oxford University.

While at St Fabian he feels a call to visit the remote island of Fanua, to which he goes alone, and his adventures there form the subject of this story. There is no woman in the plot except the native women, nor is there love interest. The interest lies in the fantastic character of the story, and in the satirical humour with which Mr. Fortune and his one solitary convent are described. Even Lueli, the boy convert, turns out to be no convert at all, but adheres to Mr. Fortune through

59

interest in his European ways. In a great earthquake on the island, however, he saved his life. Mr. Fortune is a fatuous and quite impossible character, but then he is meant to so, and therein is the maggot or whimsical fantasy.

Mansfield Reporter, July 29, 1927

ANOTHER QUEER TALE

Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner's latest production, Mr. Fortune's Maggot, is an elegant little tale, to whose elegance the publisher and the printer no less than the author have contributed. One surmises that if Stella Benson and David Garnett had never written, or if its predecessor, Lolly Willowes, had been less loudly acclaimed, this newest venture would have been other than it is. This is, of course, no necessary dispraise. Has it not been authoritatively said that Shakespeare owes something of his form to Marlowe ? Nevertheless, there are moments in Mr. Fortune's Maggot when the reader is conscious that Miss Warner is, as it were, feeling for her style, and grasping it not always with that unerring skill which eliminates all sense of effort. But when criticism is exhausted we are still left with a pleasant story—the story of a missionary who undertook a solitary mission to a sun-enchanted island of the Pacific for the conversion of its care-free islanders, but who was himself converted. From what, by what, and to what he was converted the reader may be left to ascertain as best he may from the scanty outlines of Miss Townsend Warner's tale. But if enlightenment on these points never comes to him he may nevertheless count his effort of reading not ill spent. The island of Fanua is a very pleasant haven for a two hours’ sojourn, and the missionary overseas (like the curate of our own countryside) has become by hallowed tradition the focus of all that is whimsical and absurd. Someday, perhaps Miss Townsend Warner will write us an equally good story about a mother-in-law.

M. D. S., Common Cause, August 19, 1927

60

MURAL TRIPE

There is a nice phrase in Miss Sylvia Townsend Warner's book, Mr. Fortune's Maggot, which exactly fits the fantastic embellishments which the creators of London domestic architecture during the last fifty years have been fond of — “mural tripe.” So good that; and there it is, chunks of it, dripping through South and West Kensington, festooned around cornices and exuding over front doors.

Lenox Fane, ‘A Woman’s Letter,’ The Graphic, August 6, 1927

61

62