by Paula Byrne
The second writer was Stevie Smith – particularly her 1936 Novel on Yellow Paper. The book is structured as the random typings of a bored secretary, where she discusses death, life, sex, relationships, even Nazism. Here she is discussing sex, which in retrospect seems risqué for a novel of the 1930s:
Now this, brings us slap up against that mighty ogre Sex that is a worse ogre to the novelist than those families histories I so cleverly avoided a few pages back. But oh how I have enjoyed sex I do enjoy myself so much I cannot pass it over …
Cenobites just can’t take sex as they find it, it has to be conflict and frustration and really so-o-o important in a way it isn’t really important, though it is important in the way if it wasn’t there it would be a pretty punk world. But you could never say of a cenobite that he enjoyed sex, no you couldn’t hardly say that, not that he enjoyed sex, oh no not to say enjoy.[8]
In the spring of 1938, Pym wrote a joint letter to Jock and the newlywed Harveys, whom Jock was staying with in Helsinki. It was self-mocking – a parody of herself in the manner of Stevie Smith:
Now it is spring and the garden is full of beautiful flowers, primroses, violets, daffodils, scyllas, grape hyacinths, anemones, und so weiter (and so on). And Miss Pym is looking out of the window – and you will be asking now who is this Miss Pym and I will tell you she is a spinster lady who was thought to be disappointed in love and so now you know who is this Miss Pym.
But this Miss Pym, although she is, so to speak, a maid, is not dancing in a ring, no sir and she is not frisking, no buddy, no how. She is seeing an old brown horse which is walking with a slow majestic dignity across this field and she is thinking that it is the horse she will be imitating and not the lambs.[9]
Henry later recalled ‘how beautifully, delightfully, cleverly, deliciously, inventively dotty Pym’s letters to Finland were’.[10] What he failed to see, then and before, was the very real pain that lay beneath the humour.
In the summer of 1937, Jock had gone on holiday with the Harveys to France and Italy. He wrote to Pym in the style of Compton-Burnett:
Ladies and Gentlemen
‘Ah, very fine,’ said Elsie. ‘These hills are like Alps and perhaps there is skiing. It is like dear Finland – but there is no lake. It is a pity.’
‘No Elsie, I do not think it is very like Finland,’ said Henry. ‘In Finland there are no such mountains. In fact, there are no mountains at all.’
‘True, but the nature is like,’ said Elsie.
‘You must not say “nature” when you mean “scenery”,’ said Henry, ‘and I do not think you have brushed your teeth today and I fear you have not been to the lavatory. We should not like to be constipated, should we Jock?’
‘No,’ said Jock, ‘I suppose we should not. And I daresay that she should not like it either and it is known that women have different tastes to men. Why do you not let her decide?’ …
‘Here is an hotel,’ said Henry. ‘Shall we stop here?’
‘It is well recommended,’ said Jock, ‘that is something.’
‘Let us drive round and look at other hotels,’ said Elsie. ‘Let us choose after full consideration.’
‘Let us make haste,’ said Jock, ‘there is thunder and lightning and much rain.’
‘Ah, thunder is so dangerous,’ said Elsie.[11]
It was Jock’s way of showing Pym that she had made a lucky escape from Henry’s controlling and pedantic behaviour. Pym responded in kind, though her highly tuned parody is more effective and more comic than Jock could deliver:
‘Those flowers were some I picked in the garden of St Hilda’s in the spring of five years ago … So dear Lorenzo, would you like these poor flowers that have waited five years to be given to you? No? It was what I thought. You would not wish me to be deprived of any sentimental token that would give me pleasure.’
‘No,’ said the Herr Lektor in an emphatic voice – ‘I should not wish it.’
‘I think Miss Pym is not quite herself today,’ said Mr Liddell, in a nervous, hurrying tone. ‘This talk of pressed flowers and sentimental tokens is not good’ …
‘Oh fancy if all passion should not be spent!’ said the Frau Lektor in a high, agitated tone.
‘Oh, do not speak of it. It is more than I can bear,’ said her husband sinking down on to the couch and taking a glass of schnapps.
‘Well, well,’ said Miss Pym, coming into the room. ‘Two old men bearing an imaginary burden, that is what I see’ …
‘Oh, do not say any more. My head is reeling. I cannot keep up with this,’ said Mr Harvey, in a low, groaning voice … ‘we do not wish to be hearing about these dreadful people she is associating with.’
‘Oh, fancy that the Herr Lektor should end a sentence with a preposition,’ cried Mrs Harvey in a delighted tone.[12]
Pym bravely embraced Elsie as a necessary part of her friendship with Jock and Henry. She also let Henry know that she was not pining away. She told Jock, Henry and Elsie about her ‘dear little young boy friend, Mr J’, who was now in Spain, and she wished Henry and Elsie well: ‘Miss Pym is asking tenderly after Herr Lecktor Henry and his beautiful wife … and she is hoping to see dear Henry and darling Elsie if they come to England in the summer and she is hoping that marriage has improved dear Henry and that he will not any more be rude to her.’ She told them that she was reading The Christian Year and Don Juan, as well as Rainer Maria Rilke and the Daily Mirror, ‘and the so nice poems of John Betjeman, which remind her of standing looking up at the Randolph on early closing day and having a coltish flirtation with a young man’. Jock had not liked Julian and found him unprepossessing. She joked that it was not true: ‘For Jock has not seen him in his pretty blue suit, looking like a handsome little boy out in the East End.’[13]
Well, now, what is she doing, this Miss Pym, what has she to tell her new friends in Finland … You will perhaps be more interested to hear that Miss Pym has written 60 pages of her new novel in her lovely marbled notebook. Now this is not so much because during this week she has been doing other things. Yes, she has been sewing and buying new clothes …
Miss Pym is praying every day for Mr J. in Spain and she is writing him a beautiful poem for his birthday and it is in heroic couplets and it is such a clever poem because it spells his name down the side and it is not sentimental, no sir, it is most unique …
And she is happy again now because she has had another letter from that so kind, nice Mr Liddell out of Helsingfors. And she is so especially, so immensely pleased with the photograph of her dear sister Elsie, who is so charming and can speak Finnish, which is the most difficult language in the world … so cheerio chaps says this Miss Pym.[14]
Pym could not stop thinking about Stevie Smith’s brilliantly innovative Novel on Yellow Paper. For all its bright humour and inventiveness, there were also darker themes. The heroine is forced to address her own subconscious anti-Semitism, fostered and encouraged by her German boyfriend, when she confronts the reality of the Nazi persecution of the Jews:
Oh how I felt that feeling of cruelty in Germany, and the sort of vicious cruelty that isn’t battle-cruelty, but doing people to death in lavatories. Now how I remember how Karl said, No … No, Karl said, Germany couldn’t be so cruel like they said at the beginning of the war … But then see what they did this time to the Jews and the Communists … in the latrines, and the cruel beating and holding down and beating and enjoying it for the cruelty.
Oh how deeply neurotic the German people is, and how weak, and how they are giving themselves up to this sort of cruelty and viciousness, how Hitler cleared up the vice that was so in Berlin, in every postal district some new vice, how Hitler cleared that up all. And now look how it runs with the uniforms and the swastikas. And how many uniforms, how many swastikas, how many deaths and maimings, and hateful dark cellars and lavatories. Ah how decadent, how evil is Germany to-day.[15]
As with The Oppermanns, it is clear that Pym was familiar with novels exposing Nazi brutality and anti
-Semitism. But there is only silence. Her ‘Stevie Smith’ letters are peppered with German poetry, song lyrics and expressions. Beneath the humour, her resentment and barely suppressed anger broke through the calm facade:
For this Miss Pym, this spinster, she is getting to a good age now and she is got very touchy like and crabby … And then everyone is angry with her because she says these things and is not behaving like the old brown horse I was telling you about, but she is not minding that everyone is angry, no not at all … Oh you want to know everything, you old people, with your wagging fingers … well you will never know now, because this Miss Pym, this old brown horse spinster, is all shut up like an oyster or clam. And now she is an old stuffed-shirt is this gnadiges Fraulein … no sir, no how, but she is a devoted friend, Oh yes, she is so devoted.[16]
Pym’s letters in the first part of 1938 have a tone of increasing desperation. With Jock in Finland visiting Henry and Elsie, and Julian in Spain, she felt even more isolated and hopeless. It is clear, too, that her pro-German sensibilities were causing concerns at home: ‘And Miss Pym is reading the newspapers and listening to Wein du Stadt meiner Traume on the wireless. But it is not that any more. No it is Deutschland. Ein Reich, Ein Führer – Heil Hitler! That is what it is.’[17]
She was also anxious about Julian. She scanned the newspapers for news from the front in Spain: ‘I look every day in the papers to see if he is dead yet.’ What she really wanted, despite her protestations, was to be ‘imparadis’d in Mr J’s arms in Balliol’.[18]
CHAPTER XXVII
In which our Heroine sees Friedbert for the Last Time
Pym wrote to Jock again in the style of ICB explaining her alienation from her family and their disputes about her German feelings:
‘What do you think about Austria and Germany?’ asked Aunt Helen.
‘Well, I always like the Germans,’ said Barbara.
‘Oh, Barbara, surely you do not like the Germans,’ said Aunt Helen.
‘The ones I have met have been very nice,’ said Barbara in a firm, level tone. ‘I have a friend in Dresden …’
‘Ah, I expect it is a young man,’ said Aunt Helen in a triumphant tone, ‘that is what it is.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Barbara, ‘it is a young man, but that is not why …’
‘Oh Barbara, you surely would not marry a German?’ persisted Aunt Helen.
‘No, I have no intention of marrying a German,’ said Barbara firmly.
‘Well it would be something to talk about if Barbara married a German, would it not?’ persisted Aunt Helen.[1]
Pym had, at Jock’s suggestion, deleted her portrayals of Hanns and Friedbert from Some Tame Gazelle. They were rather crude caricatures of the men she had known, but she had not wholly given up on them. In Gervase and Flora, the heroine consoles herself after Gervase’s rejection by enjoying a flirtation with two ‘Finnish’ students, Torni and Ooli. Torni is fair and handsome and kisses first gently and then fiercely, muttering endearments in his own language. In the end, she chooses black-haired Ooli, who, like Friedbert, has eyes the colour of the Dover–Ostend sea on a calm day. ‘Then I don’t make you sick,’ he quips. It is Ooli who restores Flora’s confidence.[2]
For her portrayal of the two Finns, Pym (who knew nothing of Finland) drew on her memories of Hanns and Friedbert. The fact that Ooli frequently lapses into German is something of a giveaway. His funny broken English phrases, such as: ‘You are not in the right state of condition’ are Friedbert’s. Flora picks up a photograph of Ooli – ‘so stern so handsome’ – and thinks he looks like something out of a ‘German spy film’. His catchphrase is: ‘Get Knowledge, Get Understanding’. He confesses to Flora that ‘we have no humour as a race’. He wants a lovely English mistress, but more than this, would prefer an English wife. He speaks of Goethe’s Werther. Pym’s attempt at drawing Finnish men was a disaster and no doubt one of the reasons Jock disliked the book.
Friedbert’s recent letter reminded her of their passion and, despite the worrying European situation, Pym was determined to travel back to Germany to see him. Her parents were not unusual amongst the British middle classes in having been willing in the mid-thirties to send their offspring on visits to Nazi Germany. But by the spring of 1938, few could believe that Hitler’s aim of defeating communism and restoring his country to greatness was all that he intended. What is more, this time Barbara was not returning to Cologne with the National Union of Students, but was making a personal trip to Dresden, intending to stay for a month. Aged just twenty-four, she was going unchaperoned to visit an SS officer who was close to Hitler. It is not clear that Dors and Links fully grasped the situation, however.
Pym left for Germany on 3 May. She had missed Friedbert’s twenty-seventh birthday on 11 April, though had made a note of it in her diary. Friedbert met her at the station in Dresden, took her to her accommodation and then they had lunch. In the afternoon, he had a sore throat and was feverish, so after dinner they parted and she slept well in her digs. Friedbert was busy with work during the day, so they established a pattern. Pym would spend the morning sightseeing, Friedbert would come for lunch, return to work, and then they would meet for supper.
Pym’s diary for this period reveals little of Friedbert’s life as an SS officer, though it is clear that there were tensions in some of their conversations. She does not record why Friedbert was stationed in Dresden. However in 1936, the Dresden Gestapo fused with the criminal police under the umbrella of the SS. By 1938, the Gestapo had moved their headquarters into the former Continental Hotel, just across the street from the city police station. Disturbingly, from 1936 the Nazis used the Münchner Platz as a ‘special court’ where alleged traitors were put on trial and executed. The site used for the killings was the courtyard between the courthouse and the prison complex; the instrument of execution was the guillotine. It is estimated that over six thousand Dresden Jews were persecuted, deported or executed between 1933 and 1945.[3] At the end of the war, the Dresden Jewish community numbered just forty-one people. By 1938, Jewish shopkeepers were prohibited from trading; soon it would be announced that Jewish doctors were no longer permitted to practise medicine.
How much Pym knew of these developments is unclear, but during her month in Dresden she spent many hours at the Eden Hotel, where she drank coffee and had access to English papers. For the first four days of her holiday, she saw little of Friedbert. On 9 May they had lunch together, then tea and supper. In the evening, they went to see Olympia – Leni Riefenstahl’s newly released Nazi propaganda film of the 1936 Olympic Games – in which Friedbert had taken part. ‘Very good’ was all Pym noted in her diary.
Friedbert introduced Barbara to two of his friends, a young woman called Inge and a man called Walter Naumann. ‘We drank a lot – Rhine wine and cocktails.’ They then went on to the Regina Palast where they drank champagne and danced until three in the morning. ‘Not much sleep that night,’ Pym wrote in her diary.[4]
They planned a trip to Prague at the weekend. In a letter to Jock, Pym confessed that things hadn’t gone as well as expected. It was hot on the train and she and Friedbert made ‘waspish’ comments to one another. A handsome Czech began talking to Barbara during the journey, which made Friedbert jealous. He had never visited Prague before and did not seem to share Barbara’s excitement.
‘Oh the Golden City, I kept saying, the Golden City.’
‘No I do not think it is Golden,’ he said.
‘To me it is Golden, it will always be Golden.’[5]
Sitting in a beer garden on her return to Dresden, Pym wrote to Jock telling him that she was educating Friedbert in the poems of John Betjeman. Friedbert would read the poems aloud to her, ‘which is a treat’. She confessed, hilariously, that he found some of the lines difficult to translate, such as: ‘The incumbent enjoying a supine incumbency.’ Friedbert got his own back by translating long passages out of the Nazi party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. There is something chillingly incongruous about
the juxtaposition of Pym and Betjeman with the Nazi and his propaganda paper.
Of course Pym put a comic spin on it all. Friedbert, she told Jock, had a disconcerting habit of ‘asking me things I feel I ought to know and don’t’:
F. Let us talk about Cromwell.
B. (in an interested, condescending tone) Cromwell? What about Cromwell?
F. (in a firm, direct tone) What was the influence of Cromwell on Milton?
B. (in a high, nervous, hurrying tone) The influence of Cromwell on Milton? Did you say the influence of Cromwell on Milton?
F. (giving the word its full meaning) Yes.[6]
Back in Dresden, they reset a pattern for their days: lunch and supper together during the week, more time at weekends. Sometimes after lunch, they would both fall asleep. Pym joked about Friedbert going back to the ‘Büro’, but it seems that he was doing more than office work. She joked in a letter to Jock: ‘Supper has been brought in and I am waiting for dear Friedbert to come: it is all so domesticated. I feel I should say “The Master has to go to Pirna today – he will not be here for lunch.” And then in he comes – the hasty husbandly kiss.’[7]
Pym’s playing at being married to an SS officer had a very dark side. It is impossible to know how much she really knew about his working life, though she must have known about the worsening political situation. In Prague, she had joked about sending John Barnicot a postcard from the cafe where he had been shot – a reference to a plot line in Some Tame Gazelle. And she had also, at the same time, read a letter that Barnicot had sent to The Times about the Sudeten Germans. Following the Anschluss, Hitler’s next ambition was the annexation of the Sudetenland. Perhaps this is the reason why Friedbert did not approve of Pym’s enthusiasm for the ‘Golden Land’ of Czechoslovakia.
