by Paula Byrne
Her friends wrote to congratulate her. John Barnicot’s wife, Elizabeth, told her that she could hardly put it down. Jock was pleased that she hadn’t spoiled it, and said that it was still the book they knew and loved, with every tiny blot removed. Pym was no doubt longing to hear from Gordon. He was now remarried (with indecent haste) and wrote that he was intending to buy a copy of ‘Some Tame Gazelle – or is it lame gazelle?’ A week later he wrote that he found it ‘quite, quite delightful – Hoccleve and Mbawawa are beautiful creations’.
Fan letters preserved by Pym praised the character of the Archdeacon. So what of the Archdeacon himself? Pym sent Henry a copy, ‘without an inscription so you can give it to somebody as a birthday present. I should never know.’ She told him that she hoped it would amuse him: ‘Please don’t notice all the places where I ought to have put commas.’[6]
Henry did not reply until September. He was now separated from Elsie and was in a new relationship with a German woman called Susi. Susi seemed to be somewhat threatened by his relationship with Pym. Henry quoted from a letter that Susi had written to him about the book. She hadn’t enjoyed it at first: ‘I suppose I was a little annoyed about the extraordinary claim she has on you, too. But soon she caught me.’ Her praise was grudging, but she ended with a generous and honest, if ambivalent, sentiment: ‘What a good heart she must have! I don’t ever want to meet her. She moved me to tears when I finished it this morning.’[7] It is typically insensitive and ‘Archdicanially’ of Henry to have added this passage from his insecure new lover.
By February 1951, she had completed Excellent Women and was starting a new novel which would draw on her Oxford years and her life working in an office. It would also draw on her failed love affair with Gordon Glover. In her notebook, she made it explicit that her new anti-hero would be based on the man she felt had so badly let her down.
CHAPTER VIII
In which Jock and Henry return (briefly) to the Story
Jock Liddell’s friendship with Henry Harvey had always been complicated, but by the 1950s it was almost broken.
Jock’s loyal support of Pym during the Henry years was partially governed by his own love/hate attitude towards Harvey. His unkind depiction of Henry in his Oxford novel The Last Enchantments had not helped the relationship. Jock, who could be so kind and professed to hate cruelty, was capable of directing lacerating cattiness onto those he loved or had once loved. In the novel, Henry is ‘Cyprian’ – a womaniser and a breaker of hearts. Pym is one of his victims: she is ‘Steeple Crampton’, who writes Cyprian ‘noble and tear-stained letters’.[1] Cyprian’s lovers say that they will always follow his career with interest. Liddell adds nastily, though truthfully, ‘they must have found it difficult to follow, for it never came to much and was rather devious’. It would no doubt have hurt Henry to read Liddell’s words: ‘He was not my friend, for we did not really like each other – but as we lived on the same staircase, habit and laziness caused us to spend a lot of time together at one period in our university careers.’ Cyprian is peevish, selfish and self-centred; his worst vice is envy.[2]
If a tone of bitterness had set in, it may be partially explained by the heartbreaks that Jock had endured – the death of his beloved brother and that of his lover, Gamal. The two men had died within months of one another. Back in 1944, and before he had met Eddie, Jock had confided in Pym about his great love affair. Gamal was an Egyptian pilot who crashed his plane in fog over the hills of Cairo. It had been devastating for Jock. The two men had spent every moment together that they could manage. Gamal was, he wrote, ‘one of those lovely radiant personalities who make everyone happy where they go’. He was supposed to be on his way to see Jock when the air crash happened. The Englishman was left distraught: ‘I thought I should go out of my mind at first.’ A bad attack of asthma had distracted him and Gamal’s family were loving and supportive – he told Pym that they had shown ‘the most touching devotion to me’.[3]
With Gamal’s death, he continued, he had lost something ‘wonderful and unrepeatable’ and a love that he had never deserved. He had suicidal thoughts – ‘I want life to stop’ – but felt that he must try to go on. When Don died two months later, Jock was broken. He had suffered much and some of the pain and anger he felt was projected onto Henry Harvey. Jock had repeatedly warned Pym that Henry would feel analogous ‘rage, pain and jealousy’ when she published Some Tame Gazelle. Pym seemingly was still loyal to the memory of Henry and did not rise to the bait. Nor did Henry seem to seethe with rage and jealousy. If her portrayal of gossipy, ‘spiteful old-maidish’ William Caldicote in Excellent Women was a rebuke to Jock, he did not seem to take the hint or to mind very much.
Jock’s parody of Henry – ‘Cyprian was a student of Human Nature, he said (he took a very bad degree in History)’ – strikes one of the few unkind notes in what is a beautiful and almost unbearably sad novel. It is also a poignant love letter to Oxford and to Liddell’s beloved brother. The narrator returns to Christminster (Oxford) after the war and his brother’s death. ‘I could say something of the heartache with which I walked under the dripping branches of trees, leaning out of the drenched gardens of our residential suburb – oh, beloved city, to which my heart is tied by a thousand nerve-strings and all of them twisted with pain.’[4]
CHAPTER IX
Miss Pym the Novelist takes Tea with the Distinguished Author Elizabeth Bowen in the Company of Several Homosexuals
Jock had joked that Barbara was once again ‘Miss Pym’, which is how she was referred to at the African Institute. From her notebooks and her new novel, Jane and Prudence, one could deduce that she found office life sometimes tedious and dull. There was the inevitable filing, index-compiling, proofreading, broken up by lunch and the welcome sound of the tea trolley. But now Pym had another life. That of a Jonathan Cape published author.
She had always loved her alter egos (Sandra, Pymska and the rest) and she had toyed with the idea of publishing her novels under a pen name such as Crampton Pym.[1] She felt sure that her colleagues, and in particular her boss Daryll Forde, would not read her novels. She might then have been surprised by one of her fan letters, which came from the distinguished Oxford anthropologist C. K. Meek, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute, who was a frequent visitor to the International African Institute: ‘I enjoyed the fun you poke at anthropology, including the two passages which were clearly written under the boredom of having to wade through my “Sudanese Kingdom”.’[2]
Such moments of potential embarrassment did not stop Pym from using her working life and her colleagues as copy for her novels. One evening, when the day’s work was done, she was invited for a drink in the office with the formidable Mrs Wyatt and Daryll Forde. She wasn’t quite sure if she had been invited or had misread the invitation. She thought this misunderstanding would be good in a novel, once again conflating herself with a fictional heroine, who would be a secretary: ‘She the secretary (or me) isn’t quite sure if he meant her to have a drink too.’ She decided that in her story, the drink would be with one of ‘his’ friends and she would feel inferior in ‘dress and wit’. The ‘he’ of her next novel was to be Dr Grampian, based on Daryll Forde: ‘D[aryll] should be the model for Gramp. If there is one cigarette in his case, he looks regretfully, even thoughtfully at it, then takes it himself.’[3]
Meanwhile, Pym was enjoying her success as an author. In the previous November, she had gone to a tea given for the author Elizabeth Bowen. She’d been invited by some Oxford contemporaries, Jacqueline Hope-Wallace, a civil servant, and Philip Hope-Wallace, who was drama critic of the Manchester Guardian and a music reviewer for The Gramophone. Both were gay. They shared a house in St John’s Wood with another Oxford contemporary, Veronica Wedgwood (of the famous pottery family). Veronica, later made a dame, wrote many widely read works of seventeenth-century history. She and Jacqueline were faithful partners for nearly seventy years, from their undergraduate days until Dame Veronic
a’s death in 1997 (Jacqueline lived to over a hundred, dying in 2011). Their ‘charming’ drawing room was on the first floor of the house: ‘Coral red curtains and turquoise walls – small Victorian chairs and “objects” … a kind of cosy shabbiness.’[4]
Elizabeth Bowen – posh, Anglo-Irish, sophisticated, bisexual – was in black with grey and black pearls and pretty earrings, ‘little diamond balls’. Pym thought her stammer was not as bad as she had expected. Pym was a little intimidated: ‘the young author in her nervousness talks rather too much about herself!’ They spoke about methods of composition. Elizabeth said she was ‘better at a typewriter than curled up in an armchair’. She was kind to Pym, the budding author – ‘obviously feels she ought to know more about me than she can possibly know’.[5]
The tea party was an important moment for Pym, the older author and the younger together, and, especially given the bohemian quality of the company, no doubt made her feel a million miles away from her office job. One of the guests at the tea party told Pym that two of the editors at Cape, Daniel George (Bowen’s editor) and William Plomer, were in agreement over the quality of her book. They both thought it ‘very amusing’ – apparently such concord between them was a rarity. South African-born Plomer was also gay. He had moved in the Auden–Isherwood circle in the thirties and later wrote libretti for Benjamin Britten. A sharp-eyed editor, who recognised the talent of Ian Fleming (he would be the dedicatee of Goldfinger), he wrote poetry under the pseudonym Robert Pagan and included openly homosexual relationships in a number of his novels.
The following January, Pym had tea at Fortnum’s with the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, who was a friend of Jock’s. Taylor was an almost exact contemporary. Her first novel, At Mrs Lippincote’s, published in 1945, had been well received and she went on to write a further eleven novels, as well as short stories. Her novels depicting middle- and upper-class life are beautifully observed and psychologically acute. Taylor had greatly admired Jock’s The Last Enchantments and had written to him to express her emotional response: ‘It was love I felt; yes when I have read your books I feel more loving.’[6] They began a deep and intimate correspondence, which lasted until her death. One of her short stories, ‘The Letter Writers’, was based on her epistolary relationship with Liddell.
Elizabeth Taylor was also a friend of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Jock reported that when Ivy first met Elizabeth she remarked: ‘She is a young woman who looks as if she never had to wash her gloves.’[7] Taylor was extremely beautiful and elegant and it is possible that Pym felt intimidated. By this time, Taylor had published her fifth novel. Jock thought her fourth novel, A Wreath of Roses, a masterpiece. He also said that this was the time that Taylor was attacked by envious reviewers. Years later, Pym said that Taylor was socially shy and was sometimes misunderstood as being aloof or bored.
With such exciting literary encounters, as well as publisher’s lunches with editor Daniel George, Pym had finally achieved success as an author. Excellent Women, published in 1952, would be her most popular and widely acclaimed novel. In the meantime, she was well ahead with plans for a third novel. Once again, Pym was leading a divided life – Miss Pym, personal assistant to Daryll Forde, and Barbara Pym, the author.
Nineteen fifty-two was also the year that Pym would meet a man who would be of great importance in her life. His name was Bob Smith. He was a friend of Jock’s and had expressed an interest in meeting the author of Some Tame Gazelle. Bob was Pym’s type, dark and handsome, with a touch of Julian Amery about him. He was six years younger than her and desperate to get his first novel published. He wondered if she might be able to read his work and give an opinion. Miss Pym was willing to meet him and give it a try.
CHAPTER X
The Celebrated Miss Barbara Pym
Pym’s old love, Henry Harvey, remarried in 1952. Earlier that year, Jock had sent Pym a rather extraordinary letter: ‘Elsie is divorcing Henry – what a relief it is to write irreverently of Henry and how angry he’d be! Like people making fun of the Devil … I’d like [Susi] to make Henry happy and take him RIGHT OUT OF OUR LIVES. This must confirm you in your state of single blessedness.’[1]
But Pym was long past romantic feelings for him. ‘We were both young and stupid in those days,’ she told Henry. ‘You can be quite sure I don’t bear you any ill will about anything … now we can have the satisfaction of being mean to each other – I by not giving you a copy of my new novel and you by not buying it.’[2] She had, however, been ruminating on her failed relationship with Gordon Glover. She recalled her discussion with Honor about Gordon’s treacherous penchant for sharing the same special interests with different girlfriends. Logan Pearsall Smith’s All Trivia, for example, and visits to churchyards, and theatres.
Her new novel, Excellent Women, was published in March that year. The reviews were even more positive (not always the case with a second book) and the title became a ‘Book Society Recommendation’. Marghanita Laski of the Observer raved: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever before recommended a novel as one that everybody will enjoy’, while the News Chronicle made that most flattering of all possible comparisons: ‘We needn’t bring Jane Austen into it, but Miss Pym is writing in a great tradition and knows it.’ The review from John Betjeman must have been especially gratifying, given her long-standing admiration of his poetry. He emphasised the splendid humour of the novel, describing it as a ‘perfect book’ with ‘acid powers of description’. Pym’s wit, ‘quiet restraint’, and shrewd powers of observation were noted. Praise from other writers was important to Pym. The author F. Tennyson Jesse wrote a careful and perceptive letter to Jonathan Cape: ‘It is very brilliant indeed to write about what most people would think were dull people and make them all absorbingly interesting. That is what she has achieved … It is beautifully done.’[3]
The book was a triumph. One of her friends wrote to tell Pym that the Times bookshop had sold out of copies and that W. H. Smith had a charming display in their window. Elizabeth Barnicot thought Pym was a better novelist than Jock Liddell. A poignant fan letter came from Winchester: ‘For 17 years I was in the category of “excellent women” myself … my experience, thoughts and emotions were so exactly like Mildred’s that you might have been writing about me.’[4] Strikingly, some of the readers responded to a note of sadness and wistfulness in the portrayal of Mildred. Jock, with his usual acuity, wrote that ‘the tone is beautifully and faultlessly managed – one feels Mildred genuinely expects so little for herself that it is almost sad’. The Irish Times also drew attention to the novel’s undertow, ‘under a varnish of superb comedy … there lurks a most poignant tragedy’. Another reviewer, David Cox, found it ‘entertaining and disturbing’, with Pym’s portrayal of men almost embarrassingly acute: ‘I’m sure every “man” who reads it will ask himself: Am I very dull? Am I very inconsiderate? Do I imagine women are in love with me when they obviously aren’t?’ Perhaps the only dissenting voice was that of a reader who thought the book spoilt by ‘touches of vulgarity’, asking priggishly (and unintentionally hilariously) ‘who does it please, to talk about Ladies’ Rooms and sanitary paper?’[5]
The note of tristesse that some of the reviewers and readers observed may well have irritated Pym. To her mind, Mildred Lathbury was not a figure of pity, though she is pitilessly put upon. Pym’s next heroine (also a single woman, who is about to turn thirty) scorns smug married couples who live dull, conventional lives. She enjoys the freedoms of her independent life. Prudence Bates closely resembles Pym and offers a spirited rebuttal of the ‘sad spinster’ myth.
CHAPTER XI
The Tale of Jane and Prudence
Jane and Prudence opens with an Oxford gaudy held at Prudence’s old college. Jane Cleveland, Prudence’s former tutor and now friend, is married to a clergyman and has a daughter. Prudence Bates is a good-looking, cigarette-smoking, gin-swilling, beautifully dressed, unmarried working woman with her own flat in London and a string of boyfriends. Of all Pym’s heroines, Prudence is the one who
represents how Barbara Pym would have liked to see herself – though she never flattered herself into thinking that she was beautiful. It is striking that Prudence was also the name of Gordon Glover’s daughter, with whom Pym had continued to enjoy a warm friendship.
Overtones of Jane Austen’s Emma sound in the relationship between Prudence and Jane, which resembles that between Emma and her former governess Miss Taylor. Pym references Emma, too, in her joke about Austen’s most famous spinster: ‘Prudence disliked being called “Miss Bates”; if she resembled any character in fiction, it was certainly not poor silly Miss Bates.’[1] Pym noted in her journal for February 1952, that she was rereading Jane Austen ‘to see how she tied up the loose ends’.[2]
Prudence, who is educated in a women’s college similar to the one Pym attended, had a stream of admirers in her student days: ‘Lawrence and Henry and Philip, so many of them … all coming up the drive, in a great body’. Jane describes Prudence’s love affairs as an ‘occupation’, and Prudence is now in love with her difficult, married boss, Arthur Grampian, who barely notices her existence.
As Pym observed in her notebook, ‘Gramps’ was based on Daryll Forde, which rather begs the question: did Pym have a similar crush on her married boss? When Prudence tries to explain her feelings for Dr Grampian, she describes their relationship as ‘negative … the complete lack of rapport … You see underneath all this, I feel that there really is something, something positive.’ Jane tries to stifle a yawn.[3] Miss Bates works as ‘a sort of personal assistant’ to Dr Grampian and looks after ‘the humdrum side of his work, seeing books through the press and that kind of thing’. She becomes irritated by her friends and relations, with their obsessive desire to see her happily married: ‘I often think being married would be rather a nuisance. I’ve got a nice flat and am so used to living on my own I should hardly know what to do with a husband.’[4]
