The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Jock, who had been evacuated from his beloved Greece during the war and was now living in Egypt, had been urging Pym to get back to her writing. She told him that she had taken up the manuscript of Some Tame Gazelle: ‘Like mine, your writing life is solidly rooted in the past and lives largely on memories.’[4] Jock replied that he was writing his own North Oxford novel, to be called North Oxford, or The Last Enchantments. He teased her about Pimlico: ‘one called it South Belgravia in polite circles’. But she was happy to be in like-minded company with Hilary. Jock, having lost his brother, the closest friend he ever had, reminded her of the comfort Hilary brought to Sandy.

  In January 1946, following demobilisation, Pym began looking for a job: ‘Heaven knows what I shall get, but I must earn some money.’ Post-war London was grim. Food and clothes rationing would continue for several years. Pym, like many others, found rationing far more difficult to cope with after the war than during it: ‘now that the war is over one doesn’t seem to be able to put up with things so easily’. A job, she thought, would be ‘the best way of keeping out that Angst from which we all suffer in some degree nowadays’. She duly found one: ‘I am turning into an anthropologist as I now have a job at the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures.’[5] Miss Pym had entered the world of anthropology. It would provide superb copy for her ever-fertile imagination.

  CHAPTER II

  Miss Pym the Anthropologist

  By the summer of 1946, less than a year after her mother’s death, Pym’s family life had altered dramatically. She wrote to Henry to tell him her about her change of circumstances: ‘I have so much news that I had better just fling it at you in Compton-Burnett style. Hilary and her husband have separated and my father has married again and given us a very nice stepmother of suitable age and a dear brother and sister, whom I have not met.’ She felt that her sister was much happier without her husband, who was ‘much too cold and intellectual and logical to live with’. It had been a typical war marriage, entered into with an undue degree of haste. The separation forced Pym to consider the right ingredients for a happy union. Many people, she wrote, were not madly in love when they married, but ‘turn out very well’. Ever the romantic, she told Henry that she would, personally, prefer to marry for love, ‘even if it wore off, as I am told it does’.[1]

  However, she now seemed resigned to the fact that she was and would remain a spinster: ‘Maybe I shall be able to keep my illusions as it doesn’t look like I shall ever get married.’[2] There are several references to her being a poor spinster, to the extent that one wonders whether she is protesting too much. The desire to be a published author took prominence over the desire for marriage and children.

  From this time on, Barbara and Hilary Pym would live together in a manner envisaged in the novel Barbara had written when she was twenty-two. The sisters were extremely compatible, shared the same jokes and lived in great harmony together, though each had their own circles of friends. It was a relationship that echoed the life of Pym’s literary heroine, Jane Austen, who lived contentedly with her sister, Cassandra.

  Furthermore, the unravelling of the private lives of the people to whom she was closest softened the blow of feeling that somehow she had failed in her emotional life. The Harveys’ marriage was in trouble and they would soon divorce. Jock was living in Alexandria, but had plans to return to Cairo. Pym reflected on the life they had lived as a trio on the Banbury Road in Oxford all those years ago, writing to Henry: ‘It is pleasant to feel that you and Jock will never go quite out of my life now.’[3]

  Around this time, Pym stopped writing journals in favour of notebooks, in which she scribbled ideas, thoughts and experiences. There was a new, more subdued tone to her writings and letters. Part of the reason for not keeping a journal was because she was becoming extremely busy with her job at the International African Institute. She had secured the post through a friend whose aunt was secretary there. In another of those strange Pym coincidences, her name was Beatrice Wyatt, the name of Pym’s heroine in The Lumber Room.

  Pym joined the institute on 28 February 1946. It was located in Lower Regent Street on two floors of an office building with an impressive view of the Mall. On the top floor was the library, run under the supervision of a formidable woman named Ruth Jones. Pym’s old colleague, Margaret Bryan, from the Censorship Office in Bristol, also worked at the institute.

  Pym thought her boss, Daryll Forde – the institute’s newly appointed director and Professor of Anthropology at University College London – ‘brilliant’ with ‘great charm but no manners and is altogether the sort of person I ought to work for!’ The International African Institute had been founded in 1926 as the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. Pym helped to edit the institute’s seminar papers and monographs and later worked as assistant editor on Forde’s quarterly academic journal, Africa. It was her first full-time job and she threw herself into it with her usual energy and commitment. It also gave her more good material for her novels. An anthropologist, she felt, was close to a novelist: both were concerned with the study of human behaviour.

  Pym attended Forde’s lectures to familiarise herself with her new subject. ‘On Monday[s] I spend th[e] day at University College and the London School of Economics, attending lectures on anthropology. Would you believe I could sink so low? But it helps me with my work, which is quite interesting though I work for a maddening Professor’, she explained to Henry Harvey, before thanking him for bringing her the rare delicacy of a grapefruit and telling him that she had cut her hair, making her resemble a poodle or a sheep.[4]

  A handsome man in his forties with a shock of grey hair, Forde was an exacting boss who did not suffer fools gladly (one of his favourite expressions was ‘nobody is indispensable’). Though Forde was an indefatigable fundraiser, money at the institute was always short: Pym was paid a modest salary of £5 per week. Forde had spent some of his early years at Berkeley in California, where he carried out ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Yuma tribe of Arizona and the Hopi Native Americans of New Mexico. From 1935 he worked in Nigeria with the Yako people. His work in Africa resulted in several volumes under the title African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples. Forde would remain director of the International African Institute until 1973; Pym worked alongside him throughout this time. Though utterly brilliant and dedicated, he had a reputation for being insensitive, and would often reduce Pym to tears. He expected the same standards of everyone around him, sometimes finding it bewildering that his fellow workers had lives outside the institute.

  The rest of Pym’s colleagues were female. Beatrice Wyatt was the only one strong enough to stand up to Forde. She was older than he was and had an equally forceful personality. ‘Bea is so domineering,’ he would complain, and she would respond: ‘Daryll is not a gentleman.’[5] However, they respected one another and both of them were utterly dedicated to the institute. Pym’s first main project was working on Forde’s new enterprise, ‘The Ethnographic and Linguistic Survey of Africa’, an ambitious attempt to map all the tribes and languages in Africa. Each separate volume was written by an expert in the field and Pym’s job was to keep in touch with all the authors, edit their work and compile the index for each volume.

  Pym heard from Jock, who was delighted that her living arrangement with Hilary looked to be permanent, or at least for the foreseeable future: ‘it sets you and Hilary free now from all other ties to spend your old age together … It seems an ideal position and ought to inspire you to get on with Some Tame Gazelle’.[6]

  Jock was arranging a transfer to the University of Cairo. He was a third of the way through his North Oxford novel, telling Pym that he would use the Thomas Hardy appellation ‘Christminster’ for Oxford. He had disguised certain aspects of his characters, he explained, for fear of being sued by Christine Pakenham, ‘in any case she would be ill-advised to do so’. He told Pym that the ending was so sad that he could hardly bear it
. The book was to be called The Last Enchantments, ‘from dear Matthew Arnold. A beautiful title, don’t you think.’[7]

  Jock’s letters were invaluable to Pym and she preserved them carefully (whereas she destroyed most of Henry’s). Liddell was an important link to her past, but he was also shining a light on her future. It was he who cajoled, nagged and encouraged, and it was he who persisted in believing in Pym’s potential as a published writer. It was something that she clung to as she turned again to the revisions of the novel that Jock loved so much.

  CHAPTER III

  In which Mr Jock Liddell persists and persuades Miss Pym to revise her Novel

  Jock was now living in a garden flat in Cairo with his dog Sappho and the Honourable Edward Gathorne-Hardy. Eddie was a flamboyant homosexual and one of the original ‘Bright Young Things’. He was immortalised as Miles Malpractice in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Jock wrote to Barbara from Cairo, telling her about Eddie and their life together. He described him as ‘a tall man of forty-five, in places inclined to corpulence’. Sappho was ‘so happy’, even though Eddie did not care for dogs.[1]

  Knowing Pym’s love of delicious food, ‘even when [for you] it is only a beautiful memory’, he described his luncheon menus in detail: eggs stuffed with mushrooms in a cheese sauce, tomatoes tossed in hot butter and brandy, strawberry mousse; on another occasion, ‘cold consommé, fried prawns in anchovy sauce, cold duck and a strawberry cream ice – all in the arbor in the garden’. Jock adored his garden, where he and Eddie grew roses and mint, and plucked young vine leaves to stuff with rice and raisins à la Grecque. Jock signed off his letter with an account of how ‘lovely slices of breast of duck now repose on golden aspic jelly, surrounded by slices of orange’, while Pym froze in Pimlico with an electric fire and rationed offal.[2] She sent out an appeal to Henry: ‘We have enough to eat but it is so deadly dull most of the time. Do bring me a grapefruit or an orange from Sweden if there are any. But at least we have some Camembert cheese at the moment, so life has its little glories.’[3]

  In the summer of 1945, Jock had met with his publisher Jonathan Cape, who remembered Pym and her novel. Jock delightedly wrote to Pym of that meeting in Ivy Compton-Burnett style:

  ‘Once you introduced two very attractive young women to me,’ said Mr Cape in a lascivious tone.

  ‘That would be the Miss Pyms,’ said Robert in the reserved tone of one recollecting Miss Manning’s experience.

  ‘One of them wrote a book,’ said Mr Cape. ‘I did not publish it, but yet it remains in my mind. Why should I remember it?’

  ‘Because it’s such a good book,’ said Robert in a full salesman tone, ‘What other reason could there be? I should not expect you to forget it.’

  ‘Yes, there must be something about it,’ said Mr Cape. ‘Do you still see the author? What does she do?’

  ‘She will always write,’ said Robert. ‘I think she is a natural writer.’

  ‘I think I should see that book,’ said Mr Cape.

  ‘I will give you Third Officer Pym’s address,’ said Robert quickly.

  ‘No, no,’ said Mr Cape. ‘Will you not write to her. Be vague. I do not know that I wish to see the book exactly as it was before.’

  ‘I do not think that Third Officer Pym would let you see it without revision,’ said Robert firmly.

  ‘Let her make it more malicious,’ said Mr Cape in the tone of desiring to make a book strong enough for the Cape list.

  ‘What was it like?’ said Mr Wren Howard.

  ‘It was very funny,’ said Robert, ‘with much, perhaps too much, apt quotation.’

  ‘Oh, I should not like that,’ said Mr Wren Howard.

  Is this not interesting news? Let us hope that it is great news.[4]

  A week later, Jock urged Pym to consider the advice: ‘Don’t take Mr Wren Howard too seriously about quotations … take Mr Cape’s wish for malice quite seriously. Proust, you know, went round all of his characters making them worse. What can you do with the Archdeacon?’ Jock offered to read the manuscript thoroughly and suggest an edit. Pym sent it off to Cairo and he went through it chapter by chapter, making sound and judicious suggestions for omissions and clarifications: ‘When Belinda’s thoughts are confused, do not let them confuse the reader – cf Miss Austen and Miss Bates – who is always more coherent than she means or seems to be.’[5]

  Pym followed Jock’s guidance but found the revisions difficult and had put the manuscript to one side after starting her job at the institute. Now, in the summer of 1947, the indefatigable Liddell urged her again to revise Some Tame Gazelle: ‘But why have we yet no work from your pen, Dear Barbara? Did you never nurse the dear gazelle? Mr Cape must be very impatient.’[6] And in December: ‘Why don’t you finally tame that Gazelle, and send it to dear Mr Cape. Publication would encourage you and then we might hope for more from your pen.’[7] Pym was procrastinating and told Jock that she couldn’t get it done. But he was obdurate: ‘It’s the sort of book that is needed.’[8]

  By April 1948, Pym was able to report that she had finally managed to work on the novel. Jock insisted that she should write to Cape to tell him about her progress: ‘It will be a great satisfaction to have it by one’s bedside.’ He said that he’d happily send a covering letter to Cape on her behalf: ‘I should be proud to introduce such an author to the dear house in Bedford Square.’[9] She persevered with her revisions and at last, a year later, she was able to write with the good news that Cape had finally accepted Some Tame Gazelle for publication. Jock, with typical generosity, sent his warmest congratulations:

  Dearest Barbara,

  This is delightful news! Not wonderful, for I do not wonder at it. How very glad I am that you too will be a Cape author – perhaps we may meet at one of those charming functions at Bedford Square … Fancy that you will be a novelist of the ‘fifties’ – did we think of that in days past in the dear house in the Banbury Road? You will forgive me for wishing for people to still be here to enjoy this – Aunt Janie, Don and your mother – you must have felt it too. But Hilary and I must do what we can to rejoice with you – and I do so very much.[10]

  Jock had shown himself to be a true and devoted friend. It was his constant encouragement and his belief in the talent of his friend that gave her the final push to revise and resend her manuscript. Miss Pym was about to become a published author.

  CHAPTER IV

  Miss Pym finally tames her Gazelle and it is released to the World

  The novel’s epigraph explains its curious title: ‘Some tame gazelle’ is a phrase from a poem about loneliness called ‘Something to Love’ – which might have been a better title for her novel – by an obscure early nineteenth-century poet and dramatist called Thomas Haynes Bayly:

  Something to love, some tree or flow’r,

  Something to nurse in my lonely bow’r,

  Some dog to follow, where’er I roam,

  Some bird to warble my welcome home,

  Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:

  Something to love. Oh, something to love!

  Pym encountered the poem in one of her favourite volumes of poetry, a hilarious collection published in 1930 under the inspired title: The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse.[1]

  Following Jock’s advice, Pym omitted every single Nazi, Russian and Finnish reference and much of the personal Oxford detail. The swastika that Belinda pins onto her dress, which in the original manuscript ‘Dear Helmuth’ presumes to be a sign of her sympathy with the National Socialist party, is replaced with a seed-pearl brooch. The photograph of Hitler is replaced by a photograph of Dr Nicholas Parnell. The Nazi Relief Fund is now a collection for the ‘poor in Pimlico’. There are no direct references to Oxford or the Bodleian Library. Nor is the small country village named. As a result, the novel is given a timeless air that could place it in any pre-war English village. Extra characters are added, such as ladies’ companion Connie Aspinall and dressmaker Miss Prior. The curate is no longer Henry’s son, but a young
man called Edgar Donne. Pym removed the character of Dr Parnell’s musical brother, who had been based on Don Liddell. And the Archdeacon, now at one remove, became more rounded and less of a caricature.

  Pym’s experiences during the war years had given her work added maturity and depth. Belinda, the heroine, has far more of an interior life and cuts a more tragic figure than the rather silly heroine of her first iteration. From the opening lines Pym is firmly in control of her narrative. The original beginning: ‘Tomorrow, thought Belinda, I have to go to the dentist, or is it the day after tomorrow?’ is replaced with the much stronger: ‘The new curate seemed quite a nice young man, but what a pity it was that his combinations showed, tucked carelessly into his socks, when he sat down.’[2]

  When Pym first created her heroines, she described them as spinsters in their middle forties and had great fun imagining what it would be like to envision her own life as a spinster. Now that she was no longer a young woman of twenty-one, and with a firm belief that she would not marry, her portraits became more finely nuanced and poignant. Men are scarce in her English village (a reminder that she was, in fact, writing post-war) and her female characters earn their own crust.

  The seamstress, Miss Prior, is a compelling new character, eking a living by her ability to alter clothing and make soft furnishings. Though the pre-war setting is retained, so there are no specific references to clothes rationing, it is a given that few of the women have shop-bought dresses. Similarly, the novel is studded with references to distinctly unglamorous food: cauliflower cheese, boiled chicken, Ovaltine, tinned soup (sometimes thinned with potato water), baked beans and rissoles.

  Belinda Bede, a rather anxious people-pleaser, worries about feeding her friends and her ‘help’. Early on, Pym delivers a pitch-perfect scene between Belinda and Miss Prior, who comes to the Bede cottage expecting a good lunch and is displeased to find that she is given cauliflower cheese rather than the meat that she was expecting. Miss Prior, Pym explains, is not a ‘meek little sewing woman’, but someone who inspires ‘Fear and Pity’ in Belinda. The scene is carefully calibrated to reveal the tensions between the two women and their keen sense of social distinctions.