The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Whilst typing for Henry, Pym also made time for her own novel. She channelled her fantasy of what marriage to Henry might look like if she ever succeeded in winning him over. Living in such close proximity gave her excellent copy. She had marvellous fun portraying him as the handsome but rather dim Adam and herself as Cassandra (Sandra), the perfect wife who is tempted to have an affair with a foreign stranger.

  The day Henry returned to Oxford was the first time Pym had seen him in nine months. She was wearing her turquoise dress and, for once, Henry complimented her on her appearance. He had bought a new Morris car and took her and Jock out in it to see Barnicot and Count Weiss. Later, after dropping Jock back to his digs in the Banbury Road, he took Pym for a drive in the countryside. They stopped at an old ruined nunnery, a romantic spot on the banks of the Thames, where they ‘made love’ (which probably meant no more than kissing and fondling). She had not been kissed since Budapest, so she was happy to be intimate with Henry, but she also felt that somehow he was a stranger to her. When she tried to explain her feelings, he merely responded: ‘Oh dear.’[7]

  Another outing did not go so well. Pym, Jock, Barnicot and Henry visited some ‘lovely, gracious and unspoilt’ Oxfordshire villages. Pym was in a quarrelsome mood and ‘lowered the tone’ with her talk about dance music: ‘I think I did this because I felt intellectually inferior to them all, especially Henry, who always makes you feel it more than the others do. I felt they were all against me.’ She knew that she was making things worse by her obstinacy, but for once she was tired of their condescending manner towards her: ‘I felt resentful of being dominated by them and not being allowed to be myself at all.’[8]

  Nevertheless there were better times. A row ended with a kind apology from Henry, ‘standing in the room in the early hours of the morning, looking like an unshaven Russian prince with a turquoise coloured scarf around his waist’. The next day, Henry fetched Pym in the car to listen to a record of a reading by James Joyce, with whom he was obsessed. But he was morose and bad tempered. Pym, tearful and upset, wondered why he bothered coming for her, only to be rude and obnoxious, but then his mood turned as she made to leave and he said a gentle farewell: ‘I often think that Henry is never so nice as when he’s standing at the door of the flat saying goodbye.’[9]

  One day, when Henry was out, she discovered on his desk a half-finished love poem that he had written for Elsie. He remembered that it was written in ‘bad mock-heroic’. When he returned he found that Pym had finished the poem in good mock heroic.[10] Jock had sent her a photograph of Elsie. She was a beautiful young woman with a heart-shaped face and long flaxen hair. It was a painful moment, seeing the poem, but Pym made a joke of it, whilst also showing Henry her superior writing skills.

  Pym worked ceaselessly, typing Henry’s manuscript. On the last day, she sat at her Remington all through the night and then had two hours’ sleep in Henry’s bed. She enjoyed taking care of him, making endless cups of tea and tucking him into his armchair with a rug around his knees. It was a ‘playing at’ domesticity: ‘I have been given a taste of how lovely things could be with Henry.’ Later she reflected: ‘My own little love – at that time he really was mine and nobody else’s.’[11]

  CHAPTER XIX

  The Story of Adam and Cassandra

  Back in Oswestry, Pym once again felt depressed. She confided in her diary, listing all the reasons for her misery:

  a)because I missed Henry

  b)because I loved him and could see no hope for the future

  c)because I couldn’t get any of my works accepted

  d)because Oswestry was so frightful after Oxford

  e)because it was a dull day.

  She knitted, got a new haircut and went shopping for new trollies (‘a peach and pale yellow’) before going on the annual Pym family holiday to north Wales. As usual, Henry never replied to her letters, even to send a postcard. She took solace in her writing: ‘I must work at my novel, that is the only thing there is and the only way to find any happiness at present.’[1]

  Good news came in August with a letter from the publisher Jonathan Cape saying he was interested in publishing Some Tame Gazelle, ‘if I would make some alterations’. She told Jock, who was delighted and not at all envious, though he was having no success in getting his own novel published. He told Pym that he believed Henry would be jealous of her success.

  Pym was anxious to tell Henry the good news, still believing somehow that success in the literary field would enhance her charms. ‘I daresay Jock has told you about Jonathan Cape and my novel … I am greatly cheered about this, but only vaguely hopeful.’ She joked about being able to type ‘frightfully fast after doing Gerard [Langbaine], but find that instead of being able to type words like Archdeacon and Belinda I want to type Langbaine and Architypographus’. Nevertheless, she worked hard and by July had written a hundred pages. She was also correcting and editing Some Tame Gazelle: ‘so wearying to do’. She told Henry that she no longer pined for him, ‘I mean my eyes don’t prick with tears every time I think of you as in July.’[2]

  In early September, Henry, Jock and Barnicot came to Shropshire for a flying visit. They visited Portmeirion, ‘a very charming, very Henryish place with pink and blue and yellow Italian villas and statues all about in odd corners. Henry was very nice and it was all very pleasant.’ Henry was returning to Finland, but Pym felt that she had a part of him that was hers alone. ‘I envy Elsie Godenhjelm – after all I love him too!’[3]

  By October, she had almost finished Adam and Cassandra. Pym’s new novel was heavily influenced by Elizabeth von Arnim, just as ‘Young Men in Fancy Dress’ was influenced by Crome Yellow. She had been reading The Enchanted April, a story of four gentlewomen who escape to Portofino in Italy. She draws on the same themes: the submissive, downtrodden wife who finds herself rejuvenated in the company of strangers and the beauty of her surroundings; the dull, unappreciative husband who is transformed by the magic of abroad. Pym loved the premise of the novel, which begins with an advertisement in The Times: ‘To Those Who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean To Be Let Furnished for the Month of April.’[4]

  She sets Adam and Cassandra in the small Shropshire village of Up-Callow. As with Pride and Prejudice, the novel begins with the arrival of a new tenant of the big house, Holmwood. Stefan Tilos is Hungarian, wealthy and handsome. Before long, he falls in love with Cassandra, who is neglected by her spoilt, selfish husband. She goes to Budapest, leaving her husband to the village gossip that she has run away with Tilos. Adam, the husband, follows her abroad and rediscovers his love for his wife. The dialogue is more confident than in Some Tame Gazelle and there is a first-rate comic chapter centring on a sermon by the rector, Rockingham Wilmot, in a style that would become trademark ‘Pym’. The pompous rector visits an old lady for tea. During their conversation, he praises her embroidery. She tells him that ‘some people don’t put in enough stitches’, which is the starting point for the sermon:

  ‘Some people don’t put in enough stitches,’ repeated the rector, in a slow emphatic voice. ‘Isn’t that true of many of us?’ He leaned forward. ‘Aren’t our lives pieces of embroidery that we have to fill in ourselves? Can we truthfully say that we always put in enough stitches? Are there not in all our lives some patches that look thin and not properly filled?’[5]

  Adam, meanwhile, bears more than a passing resemblance to Henry Harvey. Smug, vain and complacent, he likes being mothered by his wife; her needs are subsumed to his. ‘Only Adam was allowed to have any nerves. Cassandra had learned to keep hers in dutiful subjection.’ Pym wrote to Henry: ‘Adam is sweet but very stupid. You are sweet too, but not as consistently stupid as Adam.’[6] There are some acid touches too in Cassandra, who resents the way that she is perceived as a good wife:

  Cassandra being an excellent wife did what was expected of her … ‘Do remember that, after all, I’m not much more than a faithful wife and an excell
ent housekeeper.’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ said Adam. ‘I’m not sure it isn’t a great deal,’ he added thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes it may be,’ agreed Cassandra. ‘Anyone can be both those things with a little practice, though. They are essentially the attributes of a stupid woman.’[7]

  Adam’s ‘thoughtfully’ is a delicious barb.

  Pym used her experience of travelling to Budapest to good effect, but she felt dissatisfied with the book. The problem was that she was too often copying someone else’s style, instead of fully developing her own voice. Jock wrote to say that he thought Adam and Cassandra more mature in style than Some Tame Gazelle, but without something of its peculiar charm.

  Nevertheless, by the summer of 1936, Pym had reached a crucial moment. Later, she paid tribute to the importance of Elizabeth von Arnim’s works on her early development: ‘Such novels as The Enchanted April and The Pastor’s Wife were a revelation in their wit and delicate irony and the dry, unsentimental treatment of the relationship between men and women which touched some deep echoing chord in me at that time.’ It was at this moment that Pym made the decision as to the kind of novelist she wanted to be: ‘these novels seemed more appropriate to use as models than Crome Yellow – perhaps even the kind of things I might try to write myself’.[8]

  CHAPTER XX

  Jilted

  In September, Pym heard she had been ‘jilted’ by Cape. They had decided that they were not able to take her on and give the novel the attention it deserved. Jock was outraged and sympathetic: ‘With all my bitter experience of the falseness and cruelty of publishers I never expected anything quite so heartless as Mr Cape’s conduct to you.’ Still toying with his own plan to leave Oxford, he had been learning modern Greek and a recent holiday there had been a huge success. He was always able to say the right thing: ‘We are, I think, entirely right-minded authors – we write, not perhaps because we like it, but because we are not satisfied if we don’t … we should probably write on a desert Island if there was no possibility of publication.’[1]

  Pym told him that her next step was to try and find a literary agent, though Jock thought she could do just as well on her own. She was taken on by the Pinker agency. James Brand Pinker had been the leading agent of the early twentieth century, representing everyone from Oscar Wilde and James Joyce to H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and D. H. Lawrence. He had especially close relations with Henry James and Joseph Conrad. After his death in 1922, the agency was taken over by his two sons, and its prestige diminished. Pym was not, however, propelled into print.

  It was helpful that Jock and Pym were in the same boat – desperate to be published authors and wholly committed to a writing career and the discipline that it required, as well as the tenacity. Jock advised Pym to read Stevie Smith’s debut, Novel on Yellow Paper. She took his advice and loved both Smith’s prose and her poetry.

  Jock enclosed a letter from Henry in which Henry had denounced Barnicot, who had travelled to Finland for a visit: ‘To begin with he STINKS. He wears his light new brown suit and sweats into it and has not had a bath since I don’t know how many days before he left England.’[2] Henry could be extremely vicious when riled. He complained that Barnicot’s shoes were mouldy, his socks and feet black with dirt. He found it ‘horrible to be alone with him, or even to look at him’. Henry ranted on for four pages, pausing only to write wonderful things about Elsie. Jock advised Pym to keep Henry’s letter; ‘I’m sure H would like all that eloquence to be left for posterity.’

  Jock also confided in Pym that he had had another altercation with his stepmother, after refusing her invitation to visit his sister Betty in London. ‘We expected an outburst and even considered if that woman would not perhaps drop down dead from the shock of being opposed.’[3] In the event, she allowed Betty to visit her brothers in Oxford. Betty was a cause for alarm; she was feeble-minded and oppressed by her domineering mother.

  Pym was making plans to visit Henry and Elsie in the summer of 1937. In the end, she changed her mind and decided that she would rather return to Germany. ‘Tonight I have been drinking beer to get into practice for the large quantities we shall consume there.’[4] Pym seemed to be accepting that Henry and Elsie were becoming serious. There were jokes about embroidering a firescreen for their forthcoming nuptials and she had taken to calling Elsie ‘dear sister’. Jock seemed convinced, however, that the relationship would not last. He had been to stay with them in Finland and sent photographs: ‘My dear sister has a sweet little face, I think. What nice people Henry seems to get hold of! Because I have a beautiful nature, although opinions vary about my face.’[5] Pym, in return, joked about her availability as a companion for Elsie’s mother: ‘I am twenty-four, a gentlewoman, cultured, a good needle woman, very clean and pleasant-tempered. I speak English, German, French, Swedish, Spanish, Hungarian and Finnish.’[6]

  It was around this time that Pym, having reread and enjoyed Ivy Compton-Burnett, began to write brilliantly amusing letters in the same style. She and Jock soon became obsessed by Compton-Burnett’s novels. Jock found her address in London and was thinking of writing to her to request a meeting.

  CHAPTER XXI

  An Introduction to Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett

  Ivy Compton-Burnett became well known with the success of her second novel, Pastors and Masters, published in 1925 and hailed by the New Statesman as ‘a work of genius’. It was the first work to introduce the clipped, precise, staccato dialogue – like the plays of Harold Pinter but long before their time – for which she became famous.

  When Jock first read her novels, he said the hair on his head stood on end, ‘like that of Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey’. The Compton-Burnett themes were family relationships, unconventional sexuality and power struggles between the sexes. But for Jock, there was only one theme: ‘Here was someone who knew all the horror than can lurk behind the facade of the respectable, upper middle-class English home.’[1]

  Given his wretched upbringing, Jock identified strongly with this world. Like Pym, he was at first bemused by the strange writing style, almost entirely in dialogue, but he was soon converted by the precision and subtlety, proposing that ‘she wrote better than anyone else’. He introduced his brother to her work with the exclamation: ‘It’s about us!’ Jock’s admiration was bound up with what he saw as Compton-Burnett’s hatred of family and her mastery of dialogue. She is especially brilliant on despotic fathers:

  ‘And who has been spilling water?’ said Horace, on a deeper note.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Answer me,’ said the father, striking the table.

  ‘I have,’ said another boy in an uneven tone.

  ‘And why were you playing with water? You know that is forbidden.’

  ‘I was pouring some into a saucer, to see if it would freeze.’

  ‘You know better than that. We are not at the North Pole.’[2]

  Jock claimed that he introduced Pym to ‘ICB’, as they called her, but in fact she had read her first, two years before, and it was Pym, not Jock, who began their habit of writing comic letters in the ICB style. The dark subject matter and black humour made Jock suspect that Compton-Burnett had suffered ‘a profound and horrible experience’; how else could she have written so powerfully about cruel family life? He was determined to find out.

  The ghastly truth was discovered in the basement of the Radcliffe Camera, where the back numbers of The Times were stored. ‘With trembling fingers’, Jock read the shocking story of the double suicide of Ivy’s younger sisters, Baby and Topsy. Ivy had been called as a witness to give evidence. Thirty years later, Hilary Spurling, Compton-Burnett’s first biographer, revealed the multiple tragedies that had unfolded. The family suffered at the hands of a bullying, unhappy mother. Two of Ivy’s brothers died young (one in the Great War), and Baby and Topsy killed themselves in a suicide pact on Christmas Day in 1917. Another half-brother had killed himself. Ivy never spoke of her sisters. When Jock got to know her some
time later, Compton-Burnett claimed that, other than one friend, she had never known anyone to commit suicide.

  Pym and Jock adopted ICB’s turn of phrase and locutions, such as ‘I do not wish to be speaking of it’, and ‘in all the ways that don’t go into words’. Henry Harvey also remembers Pym and Jock’s ‘Ivy’ conversation style: ‘What could be my meaning?’ and ‘I would not tolerate it’. They particularly loved the phrase: ‘I think tea should go through all its proper stages.’ They ‘tried to make life produce enough dialogue to satisfy the needs of Ivy imitation’.[3] Henry was not a fan and felt left out.

  More Women Than Men became one of Pym and Jock’s favourites. Set in a girls’ boarding school, it revolves around the formidable and manipulative Mrs Napier, who conceals her true nature beneath a facade of gentility and amiability. Her elderly brother, Jonathan Swift, is engaged in a long-standing homosexual love affair with one of his former pupils, Felix Bacon. There is no question about the nature of their relationship. When a friend told Compton-Burnett that some people felt the relationship between Swift and Bacon to be ‘improper’, she retorted: ‘Oh, it was meant to be improper.’

  Felix danced towards Jonathan and took a seat on his knee, the older man moving his arm as though accustomed to the position.

  ‘What would your father say, if he knew all our life together?’