Alyse and Madeleine: A Literary Friendship

When I embarked on my book, The Women Writers’ Revolution I wanted the sub-title of ‘more than Bloomsbury’ and my reason for that was it seems to me that the friendships of the writers and artists around Lady Ottoline Morel and Virginia Woolf had been subjected to overkill in literary biography. That might be debateable, but nevertheless, the interwar years were a great age of friendships. When we think of the gap between the two world wars, we see that so many individuals in the arts have been ‘paired’ in the general reception of the literature of the time.

Think of Auden and Isherwood, Britten and Pears, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, but there were thousands of others, now mostly forgotten by general readers. One of these friendships I managed to celebrate in my book, though only briefly. The women in focus are Alyse Gregory and Madeleine Walker. The first was an American editor and writer, now perhaps best known for her editorship of the prestigious journal, The Dial, for several years; the latter not known now, but very much a woman of her time.

Davos and Llewelyn Powys

The sanatorium of Davos in Switzerland is best known as the setting of the modern German classic work, The Magic Mountain, and for some high-level political summits, but back in the 1930s, it was where a number of celebrated writers were housed and treated for TB. One of these was Llewelyn Powys, one of the Powys brothers and sisters, most of whom were published writers, with John Cowper Powys enjoying a massive popularity much later. But Llewelyn was something of a ‘sage.’ His books were philosophical reads for everyman and everywoman, packed with reflections that spurred further thought.

Madeleine Walker, an Irish girl from Clones, County Monaghan, was very bright and intellectual, winning a national scholarship but then being smitten with TB of her spine. So both Llewelyn and Madeleine were destined for a long recuperation in Davos, and it was in that time that Alyse met Madeleine. They were both very much involved in most of the literary preoccupations of their time: publishing in small magazines, being in print with small but ambitious presses, and taking an active interests in all contemporary arts and politics. In that cultural hot spot in the mountains, they grew close, and at the same time, other writers and poets who were also ‘on hold’ in terms of their careers, mixed with them and other friendships were made.

Alyse met Llewelyn first in New York, and they had talked and got to know each other in her Patchin Place home; they married in 1924. Later, after Llewelyn’s death in 1939, a correspondence began between Alyse and Madeleine, and the two friends were to lead very different lives. When younger, Madeleine had written poetry, and some had been published in small magazines, but she married Dr. James Terence Curry, who served in India with the RAMC; they later married, and she became the wife of Dr Curry, the popular G.P. of Sowerby Bridge, Calderdale, after the war. In between, Madeleine had been committed to various worthwhile projects in social work, notably in Newark, where she had settled first, before going to Yorkshire.

The Friends

Alyse and Madeleine, in their letters, switch between Madeleine the student and aspiring poet, as she was in Davos, and the responsible, strongly moral and always busy young mother she was, ‘doing her bit’ for good causes, including running a centre for young women industrial workers in Newark, which combined provision of food, company and shelter in a time of crisis. But most striking of all is Madeleine’s wish to be educated, to develop intellectually, and to be able to speak and think as an equal to a figure such as Alyse, who had actually worked with famous and successful American and British writers. Consequently, there was also a switch between equals, as thinkers and socially aware artists, and their public lives and roles, when duty and responsibility took over.

In Davos, Llewelyn had given Madeleine a copy of his book, Rats in the Sacristy, and in that he wrote a dedication to her: ‘For Madeleine Walker… to help her to remember the occasion of them first meeting at Clavodel ( March 26^th. 1939) and as an offering to a young and beautiful poet.’ He then wrote a quote from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and squeezes in a short quote: ‘Death comes soon, and youth has wings… Spring alone the crocus brings… GOD HAVE MERCY ON ALL LOVERS’

Different Paths

Madeleine was always going to be committed to some kind of social involvement and contribution to the easing of the problems around her. I came to know her in 1971, when I met her daughter Catherine, who was to be the romantic novelist Kate Walker not long after that. But oddly, Madeleine, in one conversation with me, clearly wanted to cut herself off from the period in her early life when she wrote her poetry, and had no desire to talk much about Powys or indeed about another friend she had made there – the wife of Italian writer Ignazio Silone. Madeleine became a highly respected domina in the Catholic church, became a teacher and busy mother to five daughters. In the midst of all that, she managed to train as a teacher, travelling to Leeds to study at the James Graham College for her qualification.

As for Alyse: the end was sad in the extreme. She moved to Morebath in Devon, and there, in August, 1967, she took a lethal overdose. Since her death, her writings have still been in print. Not only has her diary been published, but also her fiction. Thanks to the Sundial Press, her novels have been printed as well.

What was this friendship all about? In one sense, it was like so many others, in that time when literary and artistic friendships meant a great deal, and that was because literature and the arts meant a great deal. It was an age of constant talking about books, reviewing them, writing essays on them in numerous journals. For a brief time, these two women shared their enthusiasms and expressed their opinions. For Madeleine, it all staved off the stresses and worries of wartime, and for Alyse, who had lost her husband just before the correspondence began, it was a kind of therapy.

Ironically, when I moved on from this book to write a biography of Dorothy L.Sayers, I found that her circle of friends was even more typical of its time: she was one of the Mutual Admiration Society, and we need to forget vanity, and see this is proof of the old opinion that we should tell the world about ourselves and our aspirations, because, well, nobody else will, will they?

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