The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Back at Morda Lodge for Christmas, Barbara reflected that the year had, on the whole, been happy. On 1 January 1935, she awoke from a vivid dream in which Henry was married to a Finn who was ‘not beautiful but thin’. They had kissed in the dream and Henry was kind. As she admitted to herself, it was really Jock she missed, with his conversation and good company, ‘but I am still enslaved by Henry’s baser charms’.[3]

  Jock sent regular, gossipy letters. Sensitive to the cold, he complained about the poor heating in the Bodleian and the incessant draughts. He bought a leather jacket to keep himself warm. Much of this made its way into Pym’s book. Jock kept her up to date with Henry’s news and amused her with ‘gay gossip’ about a young boy working at the library (just out of high school) whom a French journalist had tried to seduce.[4]

  By March, Pym was again in Oxford, visiting friends and her sister Hilary. She sat in Jock’s flat, wrapped in Henry’s old grey overcoat, and was flooded with memories. The atmosphere of the flat made her yearn for Henry, but she comforted herself with the thought that she would soon be back in her beloved Germany.

  CHAPTER X

  In which our Heroine goes to Germany for the third time and sleeps with her Nazi

  That spring, 1935, Nancy Mitford published a comic novel, Wigs on the Green, much to the annoyance and anger of her family. It was a merciless satire of fascism. Captain Jack of the Union Jackshirts was a parody of Diana Mitford’s lover, Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. The heroine, Eugenia Malmains, was modelled on her sister, Unity. Standing on an overturned washtub on the village green, she harangues the local yokels with her fascist declamations:

  ‘Britons, awake! Arise! Oh, British lion! … The Union Jack Movement is a youth movement,’ Eugenia cried passionately, ‘we are tired of the old … We see nothing admirable in that debating society of aged and corrupt men called Parliament which muddles our great empire into wars or treaties …’

  At this point a very old lady came up to the crowd …

  ‘Eugenia, my child,’ she said brokenly, ‘do get off that tub … Oh! When her ladyship hears of this I don’t know what will happen.’

  ‘Go away Nanny,’ said Eugenia.[1]

  It was the type of parody that Pym loved. Unity was a fixture around Oxford, where she was often to be seen at the headquarters of the British Union of Fascists in St Edward’s Street. Unmissable, this six-foot girl with the mesmerising blue eyes would sometimes appear with her pet rat, Ratular, perched on her shoulder. She was a school friend of Julia Pakenham, whom Pym knew. Pym mentions Unity Mitford in her journals, though it is unclear whether they met, either in England or in Germany.

  By 1935, everyone knew who Unity was. She had managed to insinuate herself into Hitler’s inner circle. He was transfixed by the Aryan blonde, who was a cousin of Winston Churchill, who was conceived in Swastika and whose name was Unity Valkyrie. Later, Unity’s sister, Diana, was married in Goebbels’s house, with Hitler as guest as honour.

  In April, Pym returned to Germany with the NUS. It was a smooth crossing during which she devoured a picnic of ham sandwiches, apples and chocolate. Later she sipped coffee laced with brandy and thought about who she would see from her previous trip. By the time the party reached Cologne, Pym was tired but excited. She noted that at the border the guards only asked to see passports and money, not ‘books and papers as last time’. Suddenly, she spotted Hanns. Delighted to see a familiar face, they chatted in German, though there was no sign of Friedbert. It was not long, however, before Glück heard that she was back in Germany. Her diary records: ‘Friedbert was angelic to me. Such kindness as his one can never forget.’[2]

  Pym was certainly not the only young woman at this time to be swayed by a handsome Nazi in black uniform and leather boots: to her he was a symbol of the country that she had come to love. Her feelings were shaped by the romance of the days spent together, gazing by moonlight at the Hohenzollernbrüke (the famous bridge crossing the Rhine) and cocktails (‘zwei Manhattans’) at the Excelsior, Cologne’s five-star hotel with its view of the magnificent twin-spired Gothic cathedral. Pym also remembered vividly an ‘evening of love’ at 52 Volksgarten-strasse, possibly Friedbert’s digs, close to the beautiful public park in Cologne. She had rubbed his Nivea cream on her arm in order to remember the smell of him. By now, it seems, their relationship had become physical. But her feelings were complicated: ‘for all these things I loved him and yet I hardly knew him as a person and didn’t at all agree with his National Socialism’.[3]

  When Pym returned home, Glück was much on her mind. She poured out her feelings in her diary, wondering whether she was really in love with Friedbert, or whether it was ‘mostly glamour. His being a foreigner – the little Americanisms in his speech like “terribly” and the way he said “Barbara”.’[4]

  After Cologne, Pym began reading a lot of German poetry. She also read another novel by Lion Feuchtwanger. The Oppermanns details a series of events that take place between November 1932 and the late summer of 1933. A bourgeois Jewish family, the Oppermanns, are confronted with the horrifying realities of Hitler’s Germany. They lose their business, their home and their friends, and a son, who commits suicide. There are many shocking scenes, such as when the hero, Edgar Oppermann, a celebrated surgeon who has just successfully operated on an Aryan man, is intercepted by two Nazi thugs who have him removed from the hospital. They force their way into the operating theatre, where the patient is recovering and stamp a message on the man’s bandages: ‘I have been shameless enough to allow myself to be treated by a Jew.’[5] The family manage to escape Germany, but Edgar returns only to be sent to a concentration camp. He is stripped, shaved and compelled to wear striped prison uniform. Along with the other Jewish intellectuals in the camp, he is beaten and humiliated. The inmates are forced to listen to the ‘Horst-Wessel Lied’ and are ‘educated’ into Nazism: ‘They marched into the courtyard. The prisoners stood herded together, hundreds of them, in their grotesque, striped clothing. The swastika banner was unfurled. They saluted it in the ancient Roman fashion, shouting “Heil Hitler”.’[6]

  The novel is semi-autobiographical: like the hero, Lion Feuchtwanger managed to escape to the south of France. The book was banned by the Nazi party and burned. As well as depicting Nazi brutality, it explores those in denial, who refuse to see the danger that is soon to engulf them: ‘Their homeland, their Germany had proved false to them. For centuries they had felt secure in that homeland and now everything was suddenly crumbling to bits … neighbour spied on neighbour, son on father, friend on friend.’[7]

  Pym left no record of her opinion of the book. Her trip to Cologne had reawakened her interest in the German language and she was determined to return in August, despite any misgivings she may have had about Nazi brutality towards Jews.

  In June, Unity Mitford sent shock waves throughout England by writing an open letter to the notorious propaganda paper of Julius Streicher, Der Stürmer, in which she made no bones about her anti-Semitism: ‘I have lived in Munich for a year and read Der Stürmer every week … The English have no notion of the Jewish danger … England for the English! Out with the Jews! … please publish my name in full … I want everyone to know I’m a Jew hater.’[8] This intervention was widely covered in the British press under headlines such as ‘The Girl Who Adores Hitler’ and ‘Peer’s Daughter is Jew Hater’. The newspapers loved to accompany their reports with photographs of Unity, clad in her black shirt, giving the Nazi salute. Unity’s parents were furious, with her father, Lord Redesdale, describing the Nazis as a ‘murderous gang of pests’. But they still did not prevent her from travelling to Germany and later they visited and met with Hitler, deeply impressed by the way he had united the country and was opposing communism.

  Pym was no Unity-style fanatic and she was doing everything she could to educate herself about Germany. But she was also ignoring warnings from her friends about the wisdom of her infatuation with Friedbert. In the manner of Nancy Mi
tford’s Wigs on the Green, she began to insert Nazi parodies into her novel. She also wove in her memories of her highly romanticised view of Nazi Germany, something she would later deeply regret.

  For now, Pym turned a deaf ear to the alarm bells. She returned to England and headed back to Oxford where she knew Henry was expected, as he was signed up for a teaching course. Jock told her that Henry was dangling two Finnish girlfriends, including the one who looked like Greta Garbo. She was called Brita; the other was a woman called Elsie Godenhjelm. Pym was determined to see for herself. Despite her ‘evening of love’ with Friedbert, she still wasn’t quite ready to give up on Henry.

  CHAPTER XI

  An Untoward Incident on the River

  Pym wandered the streets of Oxford in the hope of seeing Henry. Luck was on her side. After an absence of five months, he seemed genuinely pleased to see her and teased her about her pink polished toenails, telling her to hide them as much as possible, preferably under a table. This she proceeded to do when he took her to Fuller’s for coffee.

  Jock had duly reported back to Pym that Brita was ‘vulgar, coarse and plain’, and was not in the least like Greta Garbo, as Henry had led them to believe. He did not mention Elsie.

  Henry was being pleasant. It seems that he had been taken aback by Pym’s novel and was beginning to see her in a different light. That evening, in his flat, he embraced her: ‘He took me in his arms, called me darling and kissed me three times sensuously and passionately, during which I experienced again all the love I have ever felt for him. “There is no more future, there is no more past”.’[1]

  Later they went out to dinner with Jock, just like old times. The boys bickered in their usual manner. This time it was about Jock leaving Oxford and cutting himself off from it entirely. Pym noted that Jock paid for dinner. Henry was not known for his generosity and he had the impudence to tease her for her greediness: ‘It’s no use looking at those strawberries Pym. You won’t get any.’ She had actually been contemplating a lobster. Back at the flat, Pym sat on Henry’s knee, in her suspenders, which she remarked loudly was ‘so sordid’. Jock, as ever, was the willing audience and played ‘Holy, Holy Holy’ on his recorder. ‘A strange combination of circumstances,’ she noted. ‘I suppose I imagine that I must be more interesting and intelligent than the other unwanted lovers of this world.’[2]

  The relationship with Henry was back on, but he was still evasive whenever she pressed him to commit. ‘I want so much to know how things really are between us.’[3] She agonised over whether or not she could be happy just being friends or hold out some hope for romantic love, even marriage. Barnicot told her that there was no hope at all and friendship would be of no use. But she comforted herself with the thought of her novel, which she believed connected them:

  I don’t mind being part of the furniture of his background or even hanging over him like a gloomy cloud, as he said at tea one day. He himself has admitted that I have a special place in the little world he has built for himself and of which presumably J is the centre. And I suppose too that he feels this is so in the novel where I have brought us all together in our later years.[4]

  However, her novel had shown Henry that she had read his character acutely and that she was certainly not blind to his many faults.

  Pym was rudderless and still in love with her world at Oxford, even though so many of her set had moved on. ‘But at the present moment it seems as if this world is falling to pieces – so what becomes of me then?’ She developed a German persona. On her dyed blonde hair, she wore a Tyrolean hat (‘it looked like a kind of parson’s hat or dish’), even to the library. She peppered her words with German phrases and expressions, such as ‘selbstverständlich’ instead of ‘of course’. She would quote German poetry and sing loudly the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’. Her favourite wine was Liebfraumilch and she carried around her weekly copy of Die Woche. By now, she was fluent in German. Jock and Henry seemed to find her antics hilarious, not yet seeing where it was leading.

  There was a nasty incident with Henry on the river. Pym recorded the event carefully in her diary. Henry, Pym, Barnicot and Jock went on the Cherwell to a riverside pub, the Victoria Arms. It nestled on the edge of Marston village and had a foot ferry for passengers. Jock left by the foot ferry, leaving Henry and Pym alone together, where Henry proceeded to get very drunk. They were sitting next to a group of male undergraduates, one of whom made a pass at Henry. He repeatedly asked Henry to sleep with him and, Pym reported, Henry ‘rather getting the worse of it in the wit combat, diverted attention to me’. As she wryly commented: ‘From then on I was for it.’[5] Henry told the boys that Barbara was German and she played along with it, with none of them suspecting she was English. One of the young men was Jewish.

  They left the pub with the undergraduates – Henry by now exceedingly drunk – and decided that it would be a good joke to put Barbara in the punt that belonged to the young men. When she resisted one of the other men helped Henry to deposit her in the boat. Barnicot, she noted, ‘was silent’. At first she was enjoying herself, but as the punt, by now filled with a gang of drunken male strangers, moved away, she began to panic. She was far from her own group and the punt began to fill with water. She kept up the deception of being German to the bitter end, as she was far too embarrassed to admit that she was English and had once been an Oxford student: ‘I should have felt very much ashamed of myself but I wasn’t really, especially as it was all H’s fault.’ The five men then forced her to kiss them all, ‘and the Jew boy (who was the leader) tickled my bare legs somewhat unpleasantly I thought’. Eventually, Pym was rescued and taken to Jock’s flat. She felt that she ought to have been more angry with Henry for acting like a ‘complete cad’. Jock pretended to be shocked, but Pym thought that he was secretly amused. Her humiliation complete, she should have stormed out or remonstrated with Henry, as she once might have done, but her behaviour was strange. ‘I was feeling very loving to him and sprawled all over him on the sofa and kissed him as much as I could.’[6]

  Later, as if ashamed for his conduct, Henry kissed her goodnight and in the morning she went back to his flat and spent a lazy, sleepy morning with him. That day he asked her to go with him to Basingstoke to pick up a car. They took the train together, smoking Finnish cigarettes. She marvelled at the thought that she was together with Henry on a train. ‘The most ordinary things done with someone one loves are full of new significance that they never have otherwise.’ Catching a glimpse of their reflections in a shop window, she thought that she and Henry looked like two comic characters out of a musical comedy – Barbara wearing her German hat and Henry a blue one: ‘There’s always something faintly ludicrous about Henry’s hat with him inside it.’[7]

  At tea, Henry told her that if he were rich, he would buy her a cottage in the country, but no wireless; he disliked the wireless. Pym also insisted on an establishment in Oxford. For once, they seemed to be getting on very well. She loved driving back to Oxford with him in the Bentley, with the roof off, but when it started to rain, they stopped to put the roof on and she hurt her finger. Henry made a fuss of it: ‘It was nice to be poor Pymed at intervals.’ She could not help but be transfixed by his beauty: ‘I found myself wanting to gaze at Henry’s divine profile, particularly those lovely hollows in his cheeks which delight me so.’

  In the evening, Pym went riding with Henry, Jock and Barnicot in the Bentley, but Henry’s good humour had worn off. He told her that he was bored with her and made nasty comments in response to whatever she said. Barnicot sat Pym down to tell her once more that there was no hope at all as far as Henry was concerned. He advised her to be a bit rougher with him. Then, she and Henry went to the Botanical Gardens, where she chased him around with a stick. Later, they had a meal at the Union and Henry was cruel about her crooked teeth, ‘which always makes me unhappy’.[8]

  Pym, like many would-be-writers, usually wrote with an eye to posterity and a view of her future biographers: ‘Now I’ve seen Henry again I m
ust make myself write. Otherwise his biographers (or mine) will be disappointed at the break in the otherwise continuous account of my acquaintance with him.’[9] Still uncertain and unhappy about the state of their relationship, she headed back to Germany, where she was sure of receiving better treatment at the hands of her blackshirt boyfriend.

  CHAPTER XII

  ‘An English Gentlewoman can never come to any Harm’

  Pym left no record of her trip to Germany and Budapest of the summer of 1935, though there are later references to her love for Budapest: her unfinished novel Adam and Cassandra is partly set there. On 3 August, Rupert Gleadow wrote telling her how his ‘heart leapt up when I beheld your writing’. He felt jealous, he said, that she had travelled to the Hungarian capital: ‘I’ve been wanting to go there for some time … you seem to have reached a very pleasant stage, travelling about promiscuously to Cologne and Budapest and various other places and as you are a woman and have no work to worry about I suppose you’ll go on doing so.’ Pym had clearly seen Friedbert, telling Rupert that she was in love with Glück and with Henry. Rupert insisted that it was simply not ‘possible to truly give your heart to two people’. He remained deeply concerned about her interest in Nazi men. He warned her again: ‘And of course one can NOT under any circumstances love a real Nazi. Yours I’m sure must only be a pretence. The real ones (and I’ve been arrested by them!) are all sadists and keep their women brutally in order.’[1]

  Later, Henry told Pym that he did not think Friedbert was a true Nazi and that he would recant. Pym was not convinced. Glück was becoming closer to Hitler and was now involved with the organisation of the 1936 Summer Olympics. In Some Tame Gazelle, Helmuth (closely based on Friedbert) gives Belinda a framed photo of himself ‘chatting with the Führer in Berlin’. It seems possible that Pym began to consider an engagement to Friedbert Glück, a detail she used for her novel, which she finished that summer of 1935. Her mother was, not surprisingly, dead set against it.