Sylvia Townsend Warner - Mr. Fortune (New York Review Books Classics)

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (18931978) was a poet, short-story writer, and novelist, as well as an authority on early English music and a member of the Communist Party. Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (available from New York Review Books), appeared in 1926 and was the first ever Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Mr. Fortunes Maggot, her second, followed a year later. The Salutation was the title novella of a 1932 collection. According to Warners biographer Claire Harman, it was almost certainly begun in the expectation that it would grow into a full-length novel, a sequel, or an extended coda to Mr. Fortunes Maggot. Yet it also stands on its own, and Warner considered it the purest, the least time-serving story I ever wrote. Over the course of her long career, Sylvia Townsend Warner published five more novels, seven books of poetry, a translation of Proust, fourteen volumes of short stories, and a biography of T.H. White. NYRB also publishes Summer Will Show, Warners novel of the French Revolution of 1848.

ADAM MARS-JONES was born in London, where he lives and works. His fiction includes Monopolies of Love (1992) and The Waters of Thirst (1993). He writes about films and books for London newspapers.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

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www.nyrb.com

Copyright 1927, 1932 by the Estate of Sylvia Townsend Warner

Introduction copyright 2001 by Adam Mars-Jones

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Saul Leiter, Kutztown, 1948; Saul Leiter, courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 18931978.

[Mr. Fortunes maggot]

Mr. Fortune / by Sylvia Townsend Warner ; introduction by Adam Mars-Jones.

p. cm. (New York review books classics)

Previously published as: Mr. Fortunes maggot.

ISBN 978-1-59017-458-6 (alk. paper)

I. Title.

PR6045.A812M74 2011

823.914dc23

2011022234

eISBN 978-1-59017-403-6
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

The scenes and characters of this story are entirely imaginary. In the island names the vowels should be pronounced separately with the Italianate vowel-sounds. Words of three syllables are accented on the second: Fana, Luli.

I am greatly obliged to Mr. Victor Butler for his assistance in the geometrical passages, and for the definition of an umbrella.

M aggot. 2. A whimsical or perverse fancy; a crotchet.

N. E. D.

THOUGH the Reverend Timothy Fortune had spent three years in the island of Fanua he had made but one convert. Some missionaries might have been galled by this state of things, or if too good to be galled, at least flustered; but Mr. Fortune was a humble man of heart and he had the blessing which rests upon humility: an easy-going nature. In appearance he was tall, raw-boned, and rather rummaged-looking; even as a young man he had learnt that to jump in first doesnt make the bus start any sooner; and his favourite psalm was the one which begins: My soul truly waiteth still upon God.

Mr. Fortune was not a scholar, he did not know that the psalms express bygone thoughts and a bygone way of life. In his literal way he believed that the sixty-second psalm applied to him. For many years he had been a clerk in the Hornsey branch of Lloyds Bank, but he had not liked it. Whenever he weighed out the golden sovereigns in the brass scales, which tacked and sidled like a yacht in a light breeze, he remembered uneasily that the children of men are deceitful upon the weights, that they are altogether lighter than vanity itself.

In the bank, too, he had seen riches increase. But he had not set his heart upon them: and when his godmother, whose pass-book he kept, died and left him one thousand pounds, he went to a training-college, was ordained deacon, and quitted England for St. Fabien, a port on an island of the Raratongan Archipelago in the Pacific.

St. Fabien was a centre of Christianity. It had four missions: one Catholic, one Protestant, one Wesleyan, and one American. Mr. Fortune belonged to the Protestant mission. He gave great satisfaction to his superiors by doing as he was bid, teaching in the school, visiting the sick, and carrying the subscription list to the English visitors, and even greater satisfaction when they had discovered that he could keep all the accounts. At the end of ten years Archdeacon Mason was sorry to hear that Mr. Fortune (who was now a priest) had felt a call to go to the island of Fanua.

Fanua was a small remote island which could only be seen in imagination from that beach edged with tin huts where Mr. Fortune walked slowly up and down on evenings when he had time to. No steamers called there, the Archdeacon had visited it many years ago in a canoe. Now his assistant felt a call thither, not merely to visit it in the new mission launch, but to settle there, and perhaps for life.

The two clergymen strolled along the beach in the cool of the evening. The air smelt of the sea, of flowers, and of the islanders suppers.

I must warn you, Fortune, you are not likely to make many converts in Fanua.

What, are they cannibals?

No, no! But they are like children, always singing and dancing, and of course immoral. But all the natives are like that. I believe I have told you that the Raratongan language has no words for chastity or for gratitude?

Yes, I believe you did.

Well, well! You are not a young man, Fortune, you will not expect too much of the Fanuans. Singing and dancing! No actual harm in that, of course, and no doubt the climate is partly responsible. But light, my dear Fortune, light! And not only in their heels either.

I am afraid that none of the children of men weigh altogether true, said Mr. Fortune. For that matter, I have heard that many cannibals are fond of dancing.

Humanly speaking I fear that you would be wasted in Fanua. Still, if you have felt a call I must not dissuade you, I wont put any obstacles in your way. But you will be a great loss.

The Archdeacon spoke so sadly that Mr. Fortune, knowing how much he disliked accounts, wondered for a moment if God would prefer him to wait still in St. Fabien. God tries the souls of men in crafty ways, and perhaps the call had been a temptation, a temptation sent to try his humility. He turned his eyes towards where he knew the island of Fanua to lie. What his superior had said about it had not displeased him, on the contrary he liked to think of the islanders dancing and singing. It would be a beautiful estate to live among them and gather their souls as a child gathers daisies in a field.

But now the horizon was hidden in the evening haze, and Fanua seemed more remote than ever. A little cloud was coming up the heavens, slowly, towards the sunset; as it passed above the place of Fanua it brightened, it shone like a pearl, it caught the rays of the sun and glowed with a rosy rim. Mr. Fortune took the cloud to be a sign.

Heartened by a novel certainty that he was doing the right thing, he disappointed the Archdeacon quite unflinchingly and set about his preparations for the new life. Since the island was so unfrequented it was necessary to take with him provisions for at least a year. In the ordinary course of things the Mission would have supplied his outfit, but he had a scruple against availing himself of this custom because, having kept the accounts, he knew their poverty and their good works, and also because he was aware that the expedition to Fanua was looked on as, at best, a sort of pious escapade. Fortunately there were the remains of his godmothers legacy. With feelings that were a nice mixture of thrift and extravagance he bought tinned meat, soup-squares, a chest of tea, soap, a tool-box, a medicine chest, a gentlemans housewife, a second-hand harmonium (rather cumbrous and wheezy but certainly a bargain), and an oil-lamp. He also bought a quantity of those coloured glass baubles which hang so ravishingly on Christmas trees, some picture-books, rolls of white cotton, and a sewing-machine to make clothes for his converts. The Archdeacon gave him a service of altar furniture and the other mission-workers presented him with a silver teapot. With the addition of some plate-powder Mr. Fortune was now ready to embark.