Books : Backwash From a Conventional World

Selected Stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner (Viking: $24.95; 440 pages)

Read Sylvia Townsend Warner as you might take vitamins--one a day to fortify yourself against the hazards of contemporary existence. Meticulously culled from the author’s vast output of fiction, this anthology of Warner’s short stories represents 4 1/2 decades of work. It’s a panorama of mid-century English life organized according to theme and dealing with every variety of human passion; many of the most effective pieces recall England’s anguish during World War II.

Even then, her world remained within comprehensible bounds, regulated by moral, social and ethical precepts. Though her characters were almost always exceptions to the norm, there were still strict standards by which to judge them. By putting eccentric personalities into ordinary situations, and by making extreme demands upon her humdrum characters, Warner extracts drama and comedy from the most fragile material.

The first story, “A Love Match,” is a supreme example of her technique. Mr. Pilkington, the headmaster of a minor public school, meets a prim English couple during his Easter holiday at Carnac, a quiet resort on the Normandy coast. The year is 1923, and Justin Tizard is a war veteran, living in this French backwater with his solicitous sister, who in Pilkington’s view has turned her brother into an invalid by treating his stiff leg as a permanent disability. Believing that a proper job in the bracing air of his own village would be just the ticket for Tizard, Pilkington persuades his new acquaintances to return to England, promising Justin the curatorship of the local museum.

Somewhat reluctantly, the Tizards agree, and though they find the pettiness of Hallowby life uncongenial, they conform outwardly until the Great Depression penetrates their isolated enclave. Affected by the misery and suffering she sees around her, bored by bazaars and amateur theatricals, Celia Tizard becomes a radical, marching in Communist parades and generally making her presence felt in unwelcome ways. The anonymous letters start arriving shortly thereafter, proving that the village has guessed what the reader has known all along. Brother and sister, the Tizards have also been lovers since Celia first visited her wounded brother in his military hospital. In that hermetic society, incest is comprehensible; Bolshevism is not.

The Tizards ignore the letters, and life goes on much as before until a buzz bomb drops on their house and sets it on fire. The now elderly couple perish, and when the firemen find them embraced under a pile of fallen roof slates, one says: “He must have come in to comfort her. That’s my opinion.” The myth becomes fact, and the Tizards are smoothly integrated into Hallowby’s wartime history as the town’s first bomb casualties, nothing more.

“A Red Carnation” is the brief ironic story of a young German soldier excited and thrilled at the prospect of being sent to Spain to fight the Communists. His comrades dream of killing insurgents; Kurt Winkler studies his Spanish phrase book and fantasizes encounters with sultry senoritas under the palm trees of Seville. The Spanish civilians have no way of perceiving the difference and spit at him. Until then, “it had never occurred to him that in coming to Spain to fight he might also have come to Spain to die.” The collection is replete with such perceptions, moments of sudden revelations that forever alter the course of a life.

In “Boors Carousing,” a blocked writer is interrupted by an elderly neighbor who fears her pet rabbits will drown because their coop is too close to a rising river. Barely concealing his exasperation, he follows her home and lifts the hutch up to a garden table. Invited inside her house, he notes every detail of the furnishings and memorizes his hostess’s face--”Sister to the beauty of the young leaf is the beauty of the skeleton leaf, having the last skirmish of its vegetable blood before the winter sucks it into the mould.” He’s writing the story even before he gets back to his warm dry library.

While lovers of fantasy may relish the generous selection from “Kingdoms of Elfin,” one of Warner’s several excursions into the realm of magic and whimsy, her reputation seems best assured by her wryly realistic observations of English life, an affection entirely unmarred by sentimentality. In a world ruled by convention, her characters are wonderfully willful and often downright aberrant.