by Paula Byrne
Hazel Holt claimed that neither she nor Pym had much interest in anthropology, but this is not borne out in the novel that would become Less Than Angels. Pym, many years later, gave a talk for the wives of Oxford University dons, in which she said that her work at the African Institute was ‘indirectly useful’ to her life as a writer of fiction: ‘The anthropologist goes out into the field to study so-called “primitive” societies and to note their customs. Coming nearer home, this technique can be very well applied to our own society, to the things that go on in our everyday life.’[3]
Pym would use this analogy to good effect in Less Than Angels. Jokes of a sexual nature about African customs such as polygamy and the ritual of sleeping with the sister of one’s wife abound, as well as insider references to research practices and academic jargon. ‘And no expression of disgust, astonishment or amusement must show on the face of the investigator,’ says one of the characters, who had read this in an anthropologist’s manual, just as Pym had herself.[4] Pym also presents British customs with their own peculiar resonances and idiosyncrasies, especially in post-war England, where the usual hierarchies have become blurred. A ‘crisis’ occurs in the library of the new centre over whether or not to invite the students to a drinks party, which is taking place in the library for the research staff. A debutante dance in Belgravia is ‘as rewarding as any piece of native ceremonial’. Women put on their ‘war paint’ to ‘trap’ men.
The impoverished students, Mark and Digby, come to Catherine’s when they are hungry, ‘like trusting animals, expecting to be fed’. Pym’s people have their own strange customs. Catherine likes to do her housework in the evenings, which raises a few eyebrows. Alaric Lydgate likes to wear African masks to conceal his emotions and withdraw from the world. Mrs Skinner beats out her dusty rugs in the evenings, ‘like native drums’. The weekly seminar at the research centre is ‘a barbarous ceremony, possibly a throwback to the days when the Christians were thrown to the lions’.[5]
A young first-year student called Deirdre Swan falls in love with Tom and they begin a love affair, despite the fact that he is living with Catherine. When Catherine discovers the betrayal, Tom tentatively suggests having a polygamous relationship: ‘He began to form a sentence about polygamy and about how primitive societies were really better arranged than our own civilization, but another glance from Catherine stopped him.’ Tom is selfish and lazy when it comes to women; his real love is anthropology. He betrays Catherine by taking Deirdre to the very same restaurant to which he has taken her for a romantic meal and then convinces himself that Catherine is to blame for his affair: ‘She had driven him away, really when it came to the point.’[6]
A striking scene occurs when Tom’s aunt comes to Catherine’s flat to remonstrate with her about living with her nephew. Mrs Beddoes of Belgravia is well dressed and good-looking, with a nervous manner. She is a recycling of the thinly disguised version of Julian Amery’s mother, whom we first met in Pym’s unpublished home front novel. Mrs Beddoes has heard the rumours that her nephew is living in a poor part of London with a woman, but Catherine is not what she expects of a ‘mistress’. Catherine puts her straight: ‘women who live with men without being married to them aren’t necessarily very glamorous … they can be faded and worried-looking, their hands can be roughened with housework and stained with peeling vegetables.’ Mrs Beddoes scolds Catherine for living with Tom: ‘it was very wrong of you’. But the younger woman refuses to be intimidated: ‘Yes, of course women do think the worst of each other, perhaps because only they can know what they are capable of. Men are regarded as being not quite responsible for their actions.’[7]
Tom, who studies ‘kinship ties’ in the field, has been drawn to orphaned Catherine precisely because of her lack of family complications: ‘It was better when women were without kinship ties, like Catherine, he thought dispassionately and then they could be rejected at will and without the likelihood of any awkward repercussions.’ With this barbaric thought, Tom damns himself in the eyes of the reader. He has turned against his class, his privileged background and his country, and ‘thrown it all away’ to go to Africa. But when he contemplates the English system of debutante balls, he sees little difference in their customs: ‘For really when one came to consider it, what could be more primitive than the rigid ceremonial of launching a debutante on the marriage market?’[8]
When Tom decides that he does not really want to marry anyone (a third woman appears from his past as a potential mate) and wishes to return to Africa, Catherine is coolly unsympathetic: ‘How soothing it will be to get away from all this complexity of personal relationships to the simplicity of a primitive tribe, whose only complications are in their kinship structure and rules of land tenure, which you can observe with the anthropologist’s calm detachment.’[9] She now has no illusions about Tom’s detachment and egotism and yet when he calls to ask her to wash and iron his clothes, she, of course, submits without demur.
Catherine resents the fact that her own creative writing is deemed inferior to dull academic research that nobody reads. ‘A thesis must be long,’ she tells Deirdre. ‘The object, you see, is to bore and stupefy the examiners to such an extent that they will have to accept it.’ Then, in an emotional outburst, she goes one step further in a condemnation of academic writing that seems so raw and heartfelt that it must have reflected Pym’s own frustration with the caution and evasions of all the articles she had to edit for Africa: ‘Oh, what cowards scholars are! When you think of how poets and novelists rush in with their analyses of the human heart and mind and soul of which they often have far less knowledge than darling Tom has of his tribe.’[10]
In the background of Less Than Angels there lingers another rejected lover. Elaine is, we are informed, the same age as Anne Elliot of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Unlike her sisters, she has been left at home following Tom’s rejection, which has left her heartbroken:
She might, if she had come upon them, have copied out Anne Elliot’s words … ‘We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always business of some sort or other to take you back into the world immediately and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.’ But Elaine was not much of a reader; she would have said that she had no time, which was perhaps just as well, even if she had missed the consolation and pain of coming upon her feelings expressed for her in such moving words.[11]
Pym was much of a reader and these were the words that she copied out in Naples in 1943, which had given her such ‘consolation’ and ‘pain’ when she was getting over her own heartbreak. Comparisons had been made and would continue to be made with Jane Austen and here Pym pays tribute to what she deemed Austen’s greatest novel. Pym was fine-tuning her own comic talents and allowing a greater emotional intensity to flow from her prose.
But her world was a more frightening place. ‘Two wars, motor-cars and newer and more frightful bombs being invented all the time,’ says one of the anthropologist students, wearily. And there was, too, an ‘Evelyn Waugh-like’ mood in her sense that this new world was perhaps not necessarily a better one. Tom Mallow, though ‘detribalised himself’, looks sadly at the once-beautiful Georgian houses of Belgravia, now turned into flats or offices: ‘If we lamented the decay of the great civilizations of the past, he thought, should we not also regret the dreary levelling down of our own?’[12]
CHAPTER XIV
Miss Pym goes to Portugal
Soon after Jane and Prudence was published, Pym was asked a question that seemed, somewhat disingenuously, to cause her some surprise: ‘You don’t think much of men, do you?’ Her response was to say that it wasn’t her attitude at all and that some of her best friends were male.[1] It must, however, be admitted that Barbara Pym’s male characters are more often than not shifty, feckless, selfish and self-dramatising, relying on excellent wo
men to solve their difficulties. ‘Women are very powerful – perhaps they are always triumphant in the end,’ says one of her female protagonists.[2]
Perhaps this criticism led her to create a very different kind of unattainable male hero for her fifth published novel. Piers Longridge is a teacher of Portuguese. In the late summer of 1954, Pym went to Portugal with her Wren friend, Frances Atkin. They went by boat, accompanied by ‘music and flowers in the first class lounge’. On the bus after disembarking, she noted the ‘fluty well-bred English voices … rising above the natives – talk even of Harrods’. Everything was ‘spotlessly clean’. She was thrilled by the vivid colours and the flowers – ‘red and pink geraniums and carnations’ – and the hotel that smelt of ‘eucalyptus leaves, carnations and pine furniture polish’. She spotted a parrot and a Siamese cat and noted the abundance of donkeys with panniers. There were heaps of red-gold maize cobs sprawled out in the sun, and pumpkins. She saw old windmills on hills and a nun going down to the beach with a herd of little girls in pink dresses and straw hats.[3]
Later, in the dining room, she observed the Portuguese families and how late in the evening they ate, even with small children, ‘rubbing their eyes and yawning’. A beautiful thin Portuguese woman, whom she christened ‘La Traviata’, was there with her daughter, ‘a doll-like little girl in a frilly dress, her hair done in earphones’. Pym was in reflective mood and scribbled notes for a poem or a short story: ‘Carrying you like a bracelet on my wrist – not heavy now, but always there. The contrast between the damp and dim freshness of the garden, with the half sun and white brilliance of Lisbon.’[4]
Frances and Barbara travelled around Portugal. Pym noted the women in tartan skirts, with gold crescent-shaped earrings peeping out from the black shawls that covered their heads. The houses in pink, white and biscuit; oxen wearing pretty-sounding bells around their necks; boats painted in bright colours. Along the shore were racks of tiny fish, split open and drying in the sun as men and women pulled in the fishing nets. Some of the colours reminded Pym of her Naples days. Less pretty was a chicken head ‘kicked about in the dusty path’. All of her observations were carefully preserved in her notebooks. Four Englishmen, for example, wearing straw hats ‘as if fearing the sun’. One was handsome, ‘but rather decayed – vicious looking’. Another was bald, spectacled and wearing a Panama with the packing creases still showing.[5]
In the evening the sky was a clear pale blue and the countryside ‘pale tan and green’. Frances and Barbara drove through Portuguese villages and visited the castle at Palmela and then Setúbal, ‘wide, rather dusty squares, very spacious, planted with Judas trees’. Then on to Sintra, where Pym wished she had packed a copy of Byron’s Childe Harold, as it had a famous description of the beautiful hilltop town. Later, they stopped off at a church with votive offerings and wax dolls. She spotted a young priest, very well dressed, talking to another man and smoking with a cigarette holder. Reaching the coast, she found Estoril ‘very like Bournemouth … on the promenade sits an old man with a stall of second-hand objects. Some of the jewellery, rings, etc must surely have belonged to exiled royalty.’ She also wrote a character sketch of herself in Portugal:
The Englishwoman (about forty) is almost aggressively sunburnt and displays her rather scrappy neck and chest in a low cut cotton dress. She sits in a canvas chair, wearing sunglasses and a scarf on her head, meditatively picking the skin off her nose (or peeling). NB this is me … she takes out some bright blue knitting.[6]
Back in London, she returned to reality with a bang, lunching at the senior common room in the university’s School of Oriental and African Studies: ‘cold meat and salad and no wine’. But she continued her interest in Portugal by signing up for Portuguese lessons at King’s College, London.[7] Now in her early forties, she was feeling her age: ‘I cannot reach up to pluck the prickly balls off a plane tree. Once it might have looked young, charming and gay, now only middle-aged and eccentric.’[8]
CHAPTER XV
Bill
Jonathan Cape himself had by now read and enjoyed Less Than Angels and promised he would try to sell it abroad, though warning that American publishers were ‘funny people’ who made decisions not on the basis of whether a book was good, but whether it would sell well. He had failed to sell overseas rights on her previous novel. Pym wrote to Bob Smith: ‘I had a letter from Jock recently. He liked Jane and Prudence very much. But the Americans and Continentals most definitely don’t and now I am feeling a little bruised!’ But she was sanguine: ‘So humble yourself, Miss Pym and do not give yourself airs.’[1]
On 17 October 1955, Less Than Angels was published. It was favourably received, particularly by Pym’s friends and fellow novelists. Elizabeth Barnicot was particularly impressed by Pym’s treatment of ‘The Young’ – ‘I especially liked Mark and Digby’. Jock enjoyed the ‘tantalising glimpses’ of the Anglican Church, but wanted ‘stronger incense’. Elizabeth Taylor liked it best of all her novels so far and enjoyed finding out that academics could have ‘failings’ like other people and be ‘just as childish’.
Despite Cape’s warning, he did manage to sell Less Than Angels in the United States, for which Pym received a $500 advance. Nevertheless, UK sales were relatively poor, mainly due to the closure of the large wholesale booksellers, Simpkin, Marshall, who had ordered substantial copies of her previous novels and been the key to their distribution to bookshops across the country. Suddenly, exciting news came from Twentieth Century Fox, who expressed an interest in buying an option on the novel. A copy was sent to Fox’s London agent, Bill O’Hanlon, and he asked to meet with Pym. There appeared to be an attraction between them and they had a further rendezvous, going to a play together at the Polish Candlelight Club in Chepstow Villas. But the relationship floundered with a mishap on a further date.
Pym wrote that it was supposed to have been ‘an evening of seduction’ in Bill’s office over the Rialto cinema. It all went wrong, however, when she needed to use the bathroom and there was a fiasco about the location of the ladies’ room and then, finding it locked, having to fetch the key. Then the key got stuck in the lock. Eventually, they went to a pub to find another ladies’ loo: ‘there was such a strong element of farce that one couldn’t help laughing’. But clearly Bill was unimpressed, as they appear not to have met again. Nor was the novel optioned by Fox. Nevertheless, inspired by the interest in her work, she pondered on her next novel. She had an opening line, but as yet no plot.
Pym had been wondering about a theme, writing in her notebook: ‘WHAT IS MY NEXT NOVEL TO BE?’ In the pub with Bill O’Hanlon, she had noticed the presence of ‘happy little queer couples’. She also knew that she wanted to write about the clergy. She had thought of a working title, The Clergy House, but as yet she did not know how to develop the plot. At a service at St Mary Aldermary in Watling Street, where a church friend, Canon Freddie Hood was based, she heard the incongruous sound of a telephone ringing through the organ music. It gave her the idea of her opening. ‘It can begin with the shrilling of the telephone in Freddie Hood’s church.’[2] But what then?
CHAPTER XVI
What a Saga!
One of Pym’s favourite writers was the novelist, playwright and journalist Rachel Ferguson. Ferguson was a suffragette, who had been a campaigner for women’s rights from the age of sixteen. She worked for Punch magazine, writing under the name ‘Rachel’. Her first novel, False Goddesses, was published in 1922, but it was with her second, written over a decade later, that she became a literary sensation. The Brontës Went to Woolworths, as its unforgettable title suggests, is an absurdist novel which centres around the lives of the eccentric Carne sisters.
The fatherless sisters, Deirdre, Katrine and little Sheil, live with their mother in a bohemian household in Bloomsbury. Imaginative and quirky, the Carne girls spin webs of stories around household objects, toys and pets, and public figures whom they have never met. They describe a strange fantasy game, ‘the saga’, which involves finding
out the intricate details of other people’s lives. The main target of their saga is a high court judge, Sir Herbert Toddington (Toddy). The details range from his choice of pyjamas, to his favourite tipple, to his relationships with women. Much of the saga is completely invented, though the girls stalk his house and his place of work to add touches of realism to their inventions. The boundaries between fantasy and realism begin to dissolve when, by coincidence, the girls meet the Toddingtons for real.
Though the book was a success, its quirky humour and eccentricity confused some readers. The girls’ obsessive-compulsive interest in Lord Toddington (a man they had never met) was seen as just too bizarre. When the girls finally meet Toddy, they have to pretend not to know all the real details about his life that they have discovered, leading to hilarious consequences. Sometimes, they forget what they did know and shock him when they reveal details that they definitely should not know. In justifying ‘the saga’ in one of her personal memoirs, Ferguson agreed that some readers might find her ‘certifiable’: ‘I don’t doubt that Freud would have plenty to say about it and all damaging … So be it!’[1] The point is that one either gets the joke of the saga or not.
Pym did certainly get the joke. She had, ever since she was a girl, loved finding out about the lives of other people. It was partly what made her such a good novelist of observation. Her habit of ‘stalking’ Julian Amery, turning up to his family’s house in Eaton Square, staring into the windows, was all part of her own saga. Now, when Pym and Hilary were living together in Barnes, they began to play the game in more earnest. They had always enjoyed looking out of the window and inventing lives for people outside. New neighbours appeared, two young men and a dog. Barbara and Hilary began snooping from their drawing-room window, just like sisters Rhoda and Mabel in Less Than Angels. In that novel, the sisters draw great satisfaction and enjoyment from observing the goings-on outside their twitching net curtains: ‘What was the point of living in a suburb if one couldn’t show a healthy curiosity about one’s neighbours … the sisters had been sitting in Rhoda’s bed-sitting room, which commanded an excellent view of the next door back garden. They often did this on the lengthening spring evening.’[2]
