The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  The Pym sisters would look out for the men and give them nicknames: the larger one was ‘Bear’, the smaller, more delicate-looking man they dubbed ‘Squirrel’ or ‘Little Thing’. The dog, which was a poodle, they called ‘Tweetie’. They would watch as Bear and Squirrel took Tweetie for a walk beside the river. Once, the sisters followed them on a walk and Hilary tried to pet the dog. ‘Squirrel’ was unimpressed, saying: ‘He wouldn’t come to you.’ Far from feeling insulted, the sisters were delighted that they had finally heard Squirrel’s voice.

  Hazel Holt, Pym’s great friend, became involved in the Bear saga. At work at the institute, the two women invented mini sagas about the home lives of their colleagues. Pym was always much better at the invention than Hazel and sometimes her prophecies came true. There were also Pym sagas about the lives of her three cats, just as Ferguson’s Dierdre Carne invents a saga about their terrier dog, Crellie. But, as Hazel Holt suggests, the Bear and Squirrel saga was the most extensive one that Barbara and Hilary invented.

  Bear had a grey car (a Hillman Husky) and would drive off on Sundays wearing a cassock, leaving the Pym sisters even more intrigued. Barbara and Hilary had hired a car for a holiday and so were able one Sunday to follow Bear dressed in his cassock. They tracked him all the way to Kilburn, to the church of St Lawrence the Martyr. They sat at the back of the church and were delighted to discover that Bear was the organist. After the service, the women were asked to tea in the church hall, where they were welcomed by the vicar’s wife, who was holding a jar of sugar and a pink plastic apostle spoon.

  Pym’s 1956 literary notebook contains an exhaustive log of the comings and goings of the two men: ‘Little Thing seen on escalator at Piccadilly Circus’; ‘B[ear] at St L[awrences] pm.’ Even if there was no sighting, she would write down: ‘Nothing’.[3] Pym noted everything from cleaning the Husky car to Squirrel’s orange pullover – a detail she would use in A Glass of Blessings.

  The strange household became even more exciting when another young man joined Bear and Little Thing. They called him Paul. Then Squirrel left, Paul moved out and Little Thing moved back in with another man they called Tony. It was all very confusing and very intriguing:

  Well – Little Thing is definitely here, but what an elusive little creature we are, like a moth coming out only at night. Hilary and I saw him coming from the bus stop about 10.30 last night … When he made to cross the road to his house he (knowing that someone was behind him) flung out his arms in a ballet-like gesture and ran across the road. The ‘friend’ might have been Bear, for Bear was definitely there on Sunday. We saw him emerge about 5 o’clock wearing a rather nice brown tweedy suit (milk chocolate bar, solid all through) … but no Paul. Is there being a sort of rapprochement? Tony is still in residence with masses of peculiar-looking friends.[4]

  Then, to her great excitement, Hilary spotted Tony going into the staff entrance at Heal’s department store: ‘STOP PRESS! … what about going there for our office lampshades?’ Pym asked Hazel.

  Pym encouraged Hazel and Bob Smith to become involved in the saga, meticulously plotting sightings and ‘stalking’, most often to St Lawrence’s church, though also to a cemetery and a florists in Shepherd’s Bush. Once even to a private hotel in the West Country. ‘It was a lovely saga,’ recalled Holt, ‘after a while, we knew a great deal about the main characters.’[5]

  Except that the young homosexual men, who surely valued their privacy, had no idea that they were being followed in this bizarre way. And by two single middle-aged women. After all, homosexuality was still illegal. This was the period when figures such as the actor John Gielgud, the baronet and captain of industry Sir David Milne-Watson, and the MP William J. Field all found themselves arrested for importuning (‘cottaging’) in public toilets.

  The point about the Carne sisters, and their saga, is that they are in search of a father figure. Toddy is a surrogate for their own dead daddy, and much of Deirdre’s fantastic and clever invention is to console and amuse her fragile and anxious little sister. Pym’s motives are perhaps less easy to understand. Initially, the men were fictitious ‘characters’ rather than real people, but then, as with Rachel Ferguson’s heroines, Barbara would meet and befriend Bear and his circle. She was becoming ever more interested in homosexual men.

  The Bear saga would provide rich pickings for the next novel, which was germinating in Pym’s mind. And then there was Denton.

  CHAPTER XVII

  Darling Denton and Orvil Pym

  Pym had always been drawn to unattainable men. Henry had not reciprocated her love, Gordon was married with children, Jock was homosexual, and it now seemed that Bob shared the same ‘proclivities’. His letters mentioned special friendships with men, usually met abroad. Pym’s latest obsession was the ultimate in unfeasibility: a homosexual author who was deceased.

  She had long been fascinated by homosexual relationships, probably dating from her time at Oxford. In her journals, Pym had expressed a wish to write a great homosexual novel, but so far it had eluded her. Then, on holiday in Portugal, she had read a book that she had found utterly compelling. Entitled Maiden Voyage, it was by Denton Welch. She became, in her own words, ‘besotted’ with the author. She collected and read everything that he had written.

  Welch was a painter and a writer, born in 1915. A ‘weakling’, he was mercilessly bullied at his posh boarding school, Repton, by, among others, a boy called Roald Dahl, who would also become an author (he had been bullied himself – the usual cycle). Welch ran away from boarding school at the age of sixteen and relocated to China; this is the story that is told in Maiden Voyage. He returned home to study art at Goldsmith’s College in London. At the age of twenty he was knocked from his bicycle by a car, leaving him with a fractured spine – an echo of the tragic accident that Pym and Irena were directly involved in back in 1935. Though Denton recovered, he spent the remainder of his life in pain and enduring various operations and procedures, which eventually led to his early death. Writing and painting were ways to distract himself from his physical disability. He suffered from bladder and kidney infections and from partial sexual impotence.

  Denton was openly homosexual. His autobiographical novel, In Youth is Pleasure, is a shocking and beautifully written account of his early life. It begins with the hero in a hospital bed encountering his first sexual experience with a nurse who is washing between his legs. Welch wrote in stylish, candid prose that still feels entirely fresh. He died in 1948 at the age of thirty-three.

  Pym was entranced. She was drawn to Denton’s wacky, outrageous sense of humour and his interest in the trivial, the mundane, which he transcends into something magical and ethereal. A jewel box, peach melba, a picture on a biscuit tin, a scent bottle. His narrators are often discovered visiting antique shops, where they find lovely objects in other people’s junk.

  During his illness, Denton restored an eighteenth-century doll’s house.[1] For a miniaturist writer interested in the culture of objects and small things it was a labour of love, and he described the process in precise detail. Denton had long cherished the dream of living in a Georgian house and he poured out his longing into the doll’s house. He restored the delicate stair rail (‘I feel sure that it is a Chinese Chippendale fret’) and, scraping back a piece of wallpaper, was delighted to discover its original date of 1783. Pym read and reread every precious word.

  Denton’s prose is shot through with a painter’s palette of colours. Fruit is ‘violent pink’; treading in a cow pat and breaking through the crust reveals ‘darkest richest green … like velvet or jade or creamed spinach’; mushrooms, ‘with their flattened damaged gills radiating from a centre’, look like ‘shrunken scalps of coarse Oriental hair’. Pym relished such sentences as ‘Nothing could be gayer than a red lacquer coffin’ – ‘Oh darling Denton,’ she wrote, as if he were a lover.[2]

  Welch’s works are full of sex, though he is never vulgar. On one occasion, the hero steals a ruby red lipstick and paints his face and hi
s nipples a rosy red, before embarking on a sensuous dance. He masturbates in long, luscious green grass. Later, he scourges himself in front of a mirror with a leather strap. Another schoolboy is turned on by a reading of Jane Eyre.

  Denton Welch’s novels lack incident and plot, but are characterised by evocative and highly original language and expression. One can see why Pym was drawn to them. She pored over the journals and hunted down a copy of In Youth is Pleasure. How delighted she must have felt to discover the name that Denton chose for the self-styled narrator: Orvil Pym.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Tracking down Orvil Pym

  Once again, Pym involved her friends in her latest obsession. Hazel, to whom she was becoming increasingly close, shared her enthusiasm for Denton, especially the journals, ‘frustratingly edited by Jocelyn Brooke’.[1] Brooke was himself a homosexual and a neurotic novelist (his Orchid Trilogy was sometimes praised as a small-scale English equivalent of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time). He expurgated homosexual references, potential libels and material that he considered repetitive or irrelevant. Pym was frustrated because she wanted to know every detail of Denton’s brief life. Hazel Holt recalls that she and Pym knew the journals almost by heart. They would set each other quizzes to test their knowledge. But reading every word was not enough and Pym set out to discover more about her idol. She went to Somerset House to obtain a copy of his will and decided that she would go on a pilgrimage to Greenwich and find 34 Crooms Hill, where Denton once lived. There, she sat down on the low stone wall opposite, in the rain, under her umbrella and took in every detail of his house: ‘Three floors, white painted windows, dull red brick, net half curtains.’ She gazed for a few moments, but saw nothing.[2]

  Another time, Pym went with Bob Smith to Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House, west of London. In 1942, Denton Welch had wandered around the landscaped gardens, with its lakes and grottoes, furious that the villa and its grounds had been left neglected and fallen into disrepair: ‘I thought that this lovely romantic patch could be made into the most beautiful garden in all England.’[3] Pym noted: ‘Denton would be glad to know they are restoring the villa.’[4] A year later, she made another Denton pilgrimage to his final house, Middle Orchard, in the village of Crouch in Kent. She took her friend, Ailsa Currie, who lived nearby. Denton was a lover of picnics, so in his honour they picnicked on cheese, Ryvita, hard-boiled eggs, chocolate, and coffee in a flask. They tracked down his house, which was a white clapboard with a balcony on the side.

  Holt recalls that Denton was as if alive to Pym in a way that few actually living authors ever were. She was especially interested in his homosexual relationship with Eric Oliver, who posthumously published Denton’s letters and his third novel. They were a tempestuous couple. Having been introduced by a mutual friend in 1943, Denton was immediately captivated by Eric’s dark good looks and intelligence. Openly homosexual, he had long been attracted to men of a lower class than himself. Eric Oliver, an itinerant agricultural labourer, claimed to be bisexual and although he was drawn irresistibly to Denton, he was not sexually drawn to him. Denton had to sleep on a plastic sheet for incontinence and his partial impotence was problematic for Eric.[5]

  Nevertheless, there was a physical relationship of sorts. In one letter, Denton apologises for constantly pestering Eric and he is often found bewailing the fact that he had not met Eric before his accident, when he was younger and still virile. They shared a bed together when Eric came to stay for the weekend at Pitt’s Folly Cottage in Tonbridge, where Denton was living in the early 1940s. Their relationship, troubled by Denton’s neediness, adoration and moodiness, was further complicated by Eric’s dependence on alcohol. Denton would beg Eric to stop drinking so heavily, but then, following a quarrel, would lure him back to Pitt’s Folly with the promise of more drink.

  They were an odd couple: Denton, small of stature, with a limp, tiny feet and pointed aristocratic features; Eric, strong, muscular and masculine – but he was also sensitive and kind and deeply insecure. Denton wanted to take care of Eric every bit as much as Eric took care of invalid Denton. After his house was destroyed by a German V2 rocket in 1944, Eric moved in with Denton, first at Pitt’s Folly and then at Middle Orchard. The latter was rented to the men by Denton’s closest female friend, the artist Noël Adeney, who seems to have fallen in love with Denton, even though she was married and knew that Denton was homosexual. She later wrote a novel about her relationship with him, entitled No Coward Soul.

  The theme of a married woman falling in love with a sensitive, troubled homosexual man began to ferment in Pym’s mind. In a journal entry of 1956, she remarked on the ‘terrifying’ modern-day woman, with exposed bosom and permed hair: ‘no wonder men turn to other men sometimes’.[6] Her obsession with Bear and Little Thing also fired her imagination. She now had her theme in place and it would lead to one of her most brilliant (and certainly most underrated) novels.

  CHAPTER XIX

  We drink a Glass of Blessings

  John Bayley was a young fellow in English at New College, Oxford. As an undergraduate, he had been tutored by Lord David Cecil, Goldsmith’s Professor of English. Later Cecil and Bayley became colleagues and great friends. Bayley, soon to be married to the novelist Iris Murdoch, would become one of Pym’s ardent admirers.

  During the long summer vacation, Bayley visited the local library in the English village where his parents lived. He was looking for something light and entertaining to offset daily struggles with Beowulf and Paradise Lost. He found a copy of Pym’s A Glass of Blessings and was enchanted. When he arrived back at Oxford, David Cecil asked him if he had read any good books over the ‘long vac’. Bayley told Cecil about Pym’s novel: ‘Good title’ was Cecil’s response and he promised to look out for her books. Bayley was not at all sure that Cecil would remember. But he did. Not only did Lord Cecil read her latest novel, he read all of her works and wrote to Pym to congratulate her on her success.

  Pym needed encouragement of this kind; A Glass of Blessings did not receive the success of her earlier works. She had hoped that it would be published in time for Christmas sales, but the novel was delayed until April 1958. Reviews were lukewarm and she wrote, despondently: ‘Only three reviews up to 29 April, none wholly good. They say my humour deserts me when dealing with romance, that I am tone-deaf to dialogue, that I am moderately amusing.’[1] This last barb clearly stung.

  David Cecil’s ‘fan letter’ was a blessing: ‘Forgive a total stranger writing to tell you how very much he enjoys your books,’ he wrote. ‘You have so much sense of reality and sense of comedy and the people in your books are living and credible and likeable. I find this rare in modern fiction.’[2] Pym was surely delighted by this fulsome praise from an Oxford don renowned for his readings of Jane Austen. Later on, John Bayley and David Cecil would agree that A Glass of Blessings was her finest novel, contrary to the consensus of the newspaper critics.

  This, Pym’s fifth published novel, was a departure in theme and tone. A melancholic note is sounded in the heroine Wilmet Forsyth’s hopeless infatuation with a homosexual man. She is rich, elegant and attractive; in her early thirties, she has been married for ten years, though childless, and has suddenly discovered that her husband is a bore.

  The reviewers disliked Wilmet, believing her to be self-absorbed and spoilt. The critics focused on the ‘clergy house element’ and Pym herself worried that it was ‘too churchy’. Several critics wrote about the High Anglican theme: ‘An Anglo-Catholic frolic garnished with a froth of Kensington conversation and a flurry of Fathers.’ One of the few positive reviews, from the Daily Telegraph, saw beneath the High Anglican frolics of kleptomaniac Mr Bason, common Father Bode, and fasting, incense-burning Father Thames. Peter Green was the only reviewer to notice the homosexual element: ‘her naive heroine, all unawares, falls in love with an obvious homosexual’.[3]

  Piers Longridge is one of Pym’s most memorable and vivid characters. He is good-looking, cultivated and intelligen
t. He teaches Portuguese at night school and works as a proofreader. He is charming to Wilmet, flatters her with sincerity and, before she knows it, she has fallen in love. Piers seems to return her affection. But he has a secret. Wilmet believes that she has discovered his secret when she catches him in a deliberate lie. When he tells Wilmet that he is going back to work (following a lunchtime mass), she sees him hurrying into a London wine lodge.

  A sensitive reader will pick up the clues from the outset, such as when Wilmet’s mother-in-law, the marvellous Sybil, discusses the new applicants for assistant priests. She refers, darkly, to those clergymen interested in ‘youth work’, noting: ‘we know the kind of thing that sometimes happens: the lurid headlines in the gutter press or the small sad paragraph in the better papers’.[4] Though her son throws her a warning glance, Sybil continues to speak about ‘those fallen ones’ who get defrocked or go to rehabilitation. Here, Pym was drawing on a real-life case at her church, St Michael’s, where the vicar was discovered to be a paedophile preying on choirboys.

  Wilmet is, however, infatuated by Piers and cannot see what the reader sees. It requires a writer of great skill and tact to manage the narrative in this way. Wilmet is correct that Piers has a problematic relationship with alcohol (similar to that of Denton Welch’s lover, Eric Oliver), but she does not, cannot, perceive the reasons why Piers is a dipsomaniac. Piers is, admittedly, flirtatious with Wilmet, inviting her to clandestine lunches and walks in the park and by the Thames in Barnes, where they see the Harrods Furniture Depository, a detail Pym remembered from her riverside walks with Bob Smith. In a charged moment, Piers asks Wilmet if her husband is the jealous type. When she replies in the negative, Piers responds: ‘I should be if you were mine.’ For a moment, we also miss the signs and wonder if Piers is in love with Wilmet.