The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Pym alternates her narrative between Jane’s conventional and rather boring married life in a country parsonage and Prudence’s single, more exciting but erratic life in the city. If Prudence is scornful about Jane’s life, Jane pities Prudence who had ‘got into the way of preferring unsatisfactory love affairs to any others, so that it was almost becoming a bad habit’.[5]

  Unknown to her closest friends, Pym had been having an affair with a married man. His name was Thomas Kendrick, and he was the father of her close friend and fellow Wren, Frances. Tom was keeper of British and medieval antiquities at the British Museum, and, in the year that Pym began her affair, was appointed museum director. He was a jovial man, and a collector of bus tickets, which he mounted on the wall of his official residence. He sent Pym a postcard on which he drew a special bus ticket with a red corner, and told her that if she ever found such a ticket she would be ‘more than ever welcome’.[6] A surviving letter is suggestively flirtatious: ‘I am so glad you liked our matinee idols. You could not believe they would turn into such coy tarts.’[7] Tom was known to be a philanderer. He was not on good terms with his daughter, Frances, and she had no idea that her father and best friend were lovers. The affair began with lunches, and then became more intimate, though it was never serious. Pym made no reference to the relationship in her journals, and it soon fizzled out. Prudence Bates later appears again in Pym’s 1958 novel, A Glass of Blessings, as the glamorous single woman who has continued to date married men.

  In another echo of Emma, Jane Cleveland plays ‘matchmaker’ with Prudence and an attractive widower, Fabian Driver. As we have seen, Pym often based her characters on real-life models. She later wrote in a piece about her compositional methods that many of her male friends claimed they were the model for Rocky Napier. The fact that Rocky was her most conventional romantic hero was perhaps the reason, she joked. She claimed that Rocky was a composite of three men she had known. But there was only one man she based Fabian upon – and that was Gordon Glover. Fabian is a ‘Gordonish’ type – a philanderer, who is incapable of sexual fidelity and is so heartless that he brings his lovers to meet his wife. After his wife’s death, this monster of ego and selfishness places a large photograph of himself atop her grave instead of a headstone.

  Pym had contemplated publishing her Gordon journals, ‘After Christmas’, but seems to have abandoned this idea, perhaps feeling that it would be a step too far. She would have to be content with Fabian. The character bears more than a passing physical resemblance to Gordon Glover: he is handsome, leonine, with curly hair, greying at the temples. He wears a ‘carefully casual tweed suit’ and ‘brogued suede shoes’. He married Constance, a ‘gentle, faded-looking’ older woman, who brought him ‘a comfortable amount of money as well as a great deal of love’. Her death has come as a great shock to him because ‘he had almost forgotten her existence’. Now, rather than philandering, he is playing the role of the ‘inconsolable widower’. He is described as being fond of ‘grand gestures’ rather than ‘niggling details’.

  The person revealing the details about Fabian’s character to Jane Cleveland is a spinster, Jessie Morrow. In name, appearance and status, she is the same character from Pym’s North Oxford novel, Crampton Hodnet, but this reincarnation is colder and more hardened. When Jane first meets Fabian in church it is significant that he is carrying a large, phallic marrow. His first words are also revealing of character:

  ‘Of course, a man must have his meat,’ pronounced Mrs Mayhew.

  ‘Certainly he must,’ said a pleasant voice in the porch.[8]

  Fabian, conscious of his good looks, has mastered an intense stare that women find irresistible. He is gallant and charming. He tells Jane Cleveland that he lives alone, having to cook and look after himself: ‘“One manages,” said Fabian, “one has to, of course.” The third person seemed to add pathos, which was perhaps just what he intended, Jane thought.’[9]

  Jane soon discovers that Fabian is looked after by a competent cook, who feeds him ‘casseroles of hearts’. She is struck by the symbolism: ‘“A casserole of hearts,” murmured Jane in confusion, thinking of the grave and the infidelities. Did he eat his victims then?’ Nevertheless, Jane (perhaps unkindly, certainly unwisely) decides he would ‘do for Prudence’,[10] and it is not long before they begin a love affair.

  According to Pym’s first biographer, Jane Cleveland was based on Irena Pym. As with Jessie Morrow and Miss Doggett, a version of Mrs Cleveland appears in Crampton Hodnet. Jane has large eyes and short, rough curly hair like Irena’s. She dresses untidily, always looking as if she’s about to feed the chickens. Jane is clever, fond of quoting lines of verse from the English poets, but there is a quality of vagueness about her which is a source of irritation to her daughter, who is about to go up to Oxford. There is more than a touch of Julian Amery in the character of the smooth-talking MP Edward Lyall, whose ‘charming smile … seemed to include everybody’.[11]

  Prudence loves Jane, but is also irked by her shabbiness of dress and ‘her rather loud, bright voice’. She also resents Jane’s attempts to marry her off – as Pym resented her own mother’s romantic interventions. Jane is another example of a bright, Oxford-educated woman who has not fulfilled her ‘early promise’, and whose research and career have been curtailed by marriage and motherhood.

  Prudence has also not fulfilled her early promise. She works in an office alongside Miss Clothier and Miss Trapnell and two typists (one of whom is the marvellously pretty and giggling Marilyn) who also make the tea. Pym trains her unerring eye on office politics as the female staff quibble and spar with one another in an unedifying game of petty one-upmanship:

  ‘I wonder if we might have one bar of the fire on?’ asked Miss Clothier at last.

  ‘Oh, it isn’t cold,’ said Miss Trapnell. ‘Do you find it cold, Miss Bates?’ …

  ‘No, it doesn’t seem cold,’ she said.

  ‘Well, of course I have been sitting here since a quarter to ten,’ said Miss Clothier. ‘So perhaps I have got cold sitting.’

  ‘Ah, yes; you may have got cold sitting,’ agreed Miss Trapnell. ‘I have only been here since five to ten.’[12]

  The influence of Ivy Compton-Burnett can be heard in the passive-aggressive conversations between Miss Clothier and Miss Trapnell:

  ‘Would you like a biscuit, Miss Clothier?’ asked Miss Trapnell … ‘These are Lincoln cream. My grocer always saves them for me.’

  ‘Thank you’, said Miss Clothier. ‘I wonder if Dr Grampian would like one?’

  ‘I shan’t offer them. He gets a good lunch at his club and I expect he had a good breakfast.’

  ‘Miss Bates might not like it if you were to give him biscuits,’ said Miss Clothier obscurely.

  ‘There would be nothing in it if I did,’ said Miss Trapnell.[13]

  Though Prudence is irritated by her female colleagues, she believes she is intellectually superior. She rails against men like Dr Grampian, despite her love for him. Whilst he dines on smoked salmon in his ‘grand club with noble portals’, Prudence eats shepherd’s pie or stuffed marrow alone in a small rather grimy self-service cafeteria. What Pym’s work colleagues thought of her novels can only be guessed at. She perfectly captures the banality, the monotony and the shabbiness of office life, with the weak cups of tea, occasionally enlivened by cigarettes and tinned Nescafé.

  Fabian is too in love with himself to love anyone else. He sits in the pub, ‘contemplating his reflection in the looking-glass framed with mahogany and surrounded by bottles’. He lies to Jessie Morrow when he tells her sadly that his late wife was fond of quinces. She sees through his ruse: ‘As if Fabian had known or cared what Constance was fond of – why, Miss Doggett had several times offered her quinces and she always refused them.’ His ‘little romantic affairs’ during his marriage are ‘to bolster up his self-respect’. He recalls how his wife invited his lovers for the weekend, where they would sit under the walnut tree discussing him, ‘or so he had always imagined’
[14] – just as Pym and Honor had endlessly discussed Gordon and his foibles. Though Prudence realises that Fabian is a bit of a bore, she thinks they will make a handsome couple.

  Prudence’s colourful clothes provide clues to her life. She entertains Fabian at her flat in a dark-red velvet housecoat. Jane realises when she sees the garment that Prudence must be his mistress. At the office she wears dark, elegant, printed dresses, which stand out against the other women’s cottons and rayon. At the Clevelands’ dinner party, Jane wears an indeterminate summer dress, whilst Prudence is dressed in filmy black chiffon. Tensions arise at Fabian’s tea party when Jessie Morrow deliberately spills tea over Prudence’s well-cut lilac dress. Prudence does not know that Jessie is a rival for Fabian’s affections. There is something cold and shocking in Jessie’s pursuit of Fabian, knowing as she does what a monster he is and how badly he behaved to his wife. In a masterly touch, she seduces Fabian wearing his dead wife’s blue velvet dress that she has purloined.

  Shoes are an indicator of class. Constance’s are those of a gentlewoman, ‘long and narrow and of such good leather’. By contrast, Fabian is imagined as wearing brown and white shoes. Jock Liddell noted that such indicators suggest Constance has married beneath her and that Fabian is ‘common’. His vulgarity is also suggested in his taking a country walk without an umbrella.[15] Fabian, of course, cannot bring himself to tell Prudence that their affair is over. He asks Jane to break the news: ‘Fabian clasped his hands together in a despairing gesture. “Oh what am I to do,” he moaned, pacing about the room. “I haven’t the courage to tell her yet.”’[16]

  Jane’s already dim opinion of Fabian is compounded by the knowledge that he gave Prudence the same volume of poetry that his wife had once given him. Worse; he has included the very same verse inscription. This gesture is Pym’s Trivia moment. The feeling of betrayal when a lover shares the same token or cherished book with another woman: ‘Had it been somewhere in the back of his mind for all those years, to be brought out again, as a woman, searching through her piece-bag for a patch, might come upon a scrap of rare velvet or brocade?’[17]

  But Pym has the last laugh with Fabian. He has been trapped in a marriage with Jessie, who makes it clear that she will not tolerate infidelity. And then, with a last devastating flick of the switch, Pym consigns Fabian/Gordon to literary posterity with an innocently withering comment from some young undergraduates. ‘Do you think this Fabian man attractive?’ one called Paul says to his girlfriend, Flora.

  To which she replies: ‘Yes, I suppose so, in a rather used Byronic sort of way. But he’s rather middle-aged really.’[18]

  CHAPTER XII

  In which Miss Pym meets Robert Smith, is promoted to Assistant Editor of Africa, and Marks & Spencer takes Umbrage

  Once again, Jock Liddell proved himself to be a good friend when he sent Robert Smith to Pym. Bob was a civil servant who had met Jock in Egypt. He had also worked for the Foreign Office in Poland, which had inspired him to write a novel, The Winter World. Bob was six years younger than Pym, but his rather old-fashioned manners and ‘deep clerical-sounding voice’ made him seem much older. They shared much in common – going on ‘church crawls’ together and discussing books.[1]

  Pym seems to have had her usual crush: ‘The agony of wondering if he will send a Christmas card!’ According to Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, the romance quickly settled into a firm and solid friendship. As with Barbara’s friendship with Jock, it would last until the end of her life. But why did the initial spark so quickly burn out? Had Pym read the signals wrong? Bob Smith never married; his romantic interests did not lie with women. The poignant Pym theme of an unattainable love was beginning to take a new direction.

  In February 1953, Pym sent the manuscript of Jane and Prudence to Daniel George, the editor at Cape whom she shared with Elizabeth Bowen. But she wasn’t wholly confident in it: ‘I had wanted the contrasting lives of Jane and Prudence, in town and country, to stand out more. As it is they are perhaps just two rather tiresome and unsuccessful women.’ Pym also expressed concern about chapter 12 in which Jane asks Prudence if she is Fabian’s mistress. David replied positively, but with the recommendation that she omit some of the ‘Oh dear, Oh, Oh well’ exclamations. She also began working on what would become her fourth published novel, which was to be set in the work world of anthropology and home life of London suburbia.

  Upon Beatrice Wyatt’s retirement, Pym became the assistant editor of Africa, seeing the journal through the press from copy-editing to final proofreading, while Hazel Holt was promoted to become her assistant. Holt recalls Pym’s sense of pride in her job. One of her new duties was to be in charge of the Africa advertisements. Holt remembered that with the more important clients, such as banks and airlines, she would ‘assume the faintest hint of Madison Avenue’.[2]

  Pym’s third novel to reach print, Jane and Prudence, was published in September 1953. The reviews were respectful, if not ecstatic. The Observer found the structure too ‘loose and rambling not to disappoint after Excellent Women’. Likewise the Manchester Guardian considered it a ‘horrid disappointment’ after Excellent Women – her characters ‘miseducated nincompoops’. Nevertheless, Frederick Laws of the News Chronicle, who had raved over Excellent Women, described Jane and Prudence as ‘a brilliant and charming novel, which you will not easily forget’. And the redoubtable socialite, author and occasional book reviewer Lady Cynthia Asquith noted the ‘deft dialogue … almost as delectably dry as Miss Compton-Burnett’.[3]

  Friends and acquaintances were supportive. The general feeling was that she was ‘getting into her stride’, as one friend suggested. Several friends preferred it to Excellent Women: ‘The characters seem more real – particularly Prudence.’[4] Jock found it witty and kind and sharp. A blow was suddenly struck, however, when a letter arrived from the legal department of Marks and Spencer. The store had taken umbrage at Jane Cleveland’s comment about their clothes: ‘When we become distressed we shall be glad of an old dress from Marks and Spencer as we’ve never been used to anything better.’

  The letter could almost have come straight from the pages of a Pym novel: ‘This reference is clearly derogatory of the Company as both in terms and by implication it suggests that dresses worn by this Company are of inferior quality and unfit for wear by persons of the class who buy their hats from Marshall’s or Debenham’s.’ Cape responded robustly that no harm had been intended and Pym wrote dutifully that she had the greatest respect for the store: ‘The ironical thing is that I regularly buy and wear their clothes and think them excellent.’[5]

  Finally, Cape agreed to alter the offending passage in future editions, though this does not seem to have happened. The incident was just the kind of ‘umbrage taking’ that Pym found most amusing. The fact that the legal department took such a strong line suggests Pym’s ever-growing popularity as a novelist. The letter from Marks and Spencer actually quoted the fact that Pym had been described as the author of books ‘worthy of Jane Austen’ as a reason for their threat of legal action.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Miss Pym enters the New Elizabethan Age

  On the cool and drizzly day of 2 June 1953, Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at Westminster Abbey. There was a marathon eight-hour-long live BBC broadcast, a breakthrough for the history of television. For most people it was the first time they had watched an event on TV. An estimated thirty-two million British people tuned in, with a further one million listening on the radio. Barbara Pym noted the date in her diary, as she had recorded the death, lying-in and funeral of the queen’s father, George VI. Pym had gone to the lying in on 13 February 1952 – ‘very dim and cold, footsteps muffled on a thick carpet … the face of one of the yeomen of the guard, carved out of wood’. She noted the glitter of diamonds from the crown and the white flowers on the coffin.[1] And she began to wonder whether these ancient rituals were so very different from the tribal customs studied by the academics who submitted their papers to the institute.


  In Pym’s next novel, which was set in the world of anthropological research, her young hero observes the television aerials silhouetted against the London skyline, describing them as ‘a symbol of the age we live in’. Tom, who is an anthropologist, may think they look ‘almost beautiful’, but he is saddened by his uncle’s addiction, which prevents him from joining in the fun of the village carnival and festival: his uncle has become ‘a kind of prisoner, or a sacrifice laid before the altar of the television set’.[2] The wit comes from the anthropological metaphor in which a distinctive but mundane feature of contemporary life is described in similar terms to the tribal practices Pym read about in the learned pages of Africa.

  It was details such as this that gave Pym’s novels a sense of realism and authenticity. One of her admirers wrote a fan letter in which he praised her understanding of ‘post-war human beings’. All the pomp and ceremony of the queen’s coronation shed some much-needed glamour on post-war Britain, where meat was still rationed at 2 shillings a week.

  Pym’s anthropological novel, as yet untitled in 1953, shows her at her most grimly realistic. She sets much of the action in London suburbia and in the research institution of a red-brick university. We are a far cry from the glamour and glittering charm of Oxford, where the chestnuts flower and the undergraduates punt on the river. The fabulous high-camp aesthetes of Crampton Hodnet, Gabriel and Michael, are superseded by the chippy, working-class students, Mark and Digby. Pym casts a coolly critical eye on the world of post-war London academia.

  Her heroine, Catherine Oliphant, writes short stories for women’s magazines. She lives in a London flat, on the shabby side of Regent’s Park, over a newsagent’s shop, with her boyfriend, Tom Mallow. Tom comes from an upper-class family, whose family seat is in Shropshire and, to their dismay, has become an anthropologist doing field work in Africa.