The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  There were similarities between Larkin and Pym. Both hailed from lower-middle-class families; both had gone to Oxford, where they had been transported into new worlds and experiences that were formative. Both of them found lifelong friends from higher class backgrounds, which in many respects alienated them from their families and left them permanently displaced. Whilst at Oxford, like Pym before him, Larkin created an alter ego. His was a writer called Brunette Coleman, who wrote bawdy lesbian stories. Trouble at Willow Gables is set at a girls’ boarding school, parodying the ‘jolly hockey sticks’ style of Angela Brazil. Its (incomplete) sequel, Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s, is set in an Oxford women’s college. In part, Larkin wrote his stories to amuse his Oxford friends, in particular Kingsley Amis. ‘I am spending my time doing an obscene Lesbian novel in the form of a school story,’ he told another Oxford friend.[2]

  For all of their lives, Larkin and Amis wrote filthy letters to one another, trying to outdo one another in explicit, outrageous language, often signing off their letters with obscenities: ‘Don’t forget my book you fuckpot’, ‘I often tear pages out of books of that kind to clean my arse-hole with after I have shat’.[3] Another habit was to add the word ‘bum’ to people or places. ‘Margaret Thatcher bum’, ‘Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry bum’, ‘Handel bum’, ‘handsome bum Philip’. As Larkin’s biographer Andrew Motion suggests, this was part schoolboy humour, part experimenting with a mockery of pomposity and middle-class respectability: ‘the discrepancies between what can be said or shown in public and what in private’ would become a feature of their mature writing.[4]

  Larkin and Amis both got firsts at Oxford. Amis named his firstborn son after Philip: ‘My little son has a face like that of an ageing railway porter who is beginning to realise his untidiness means he’ll never get that ticket-collector’s job he’s been after for 28 years.’[5] In later years, their friendship was largely based on their correspondence. Larkin, at heart deeply shy and socially awkward, often preferred friendships that were epistolary.

  Despite the schoolboy frolics and heavy drinking at Oxford, Larkin completed his first grown-up novel by the age of twenty-one. Set in wartime Oxford, Jill is a beautifully written, poignant story about a lonely, lower-middle-class undergraduate who finds it difficult to adjust to university life. The hapless hero, John Kemp, invents a sister (Jill) to assuage his sense of worthlessness and inferiority and to impress his odious, thuggish contemporaries, who bully and manipulate him. This was not at all Larkin’s own experience of Oxford, but many of Kemp’s insecurities, deep feelings of loneliness and escapes into a world of fantasy were Larkin’s own.

  Like Barbara Pym, Larkin took a job to supplement his writing career. Indeed, many hours of library time were spent writing and redrafting his literary output or scribbling letters to his friends. His correspondence with Pym lasted until her death. His letters to her are, as his literary executor Andrew Motion puts it, some of the ‘funniest and most charming’ he ever wrote.[6]

  Their epistolary relationship began in a formal fashion – ‘Miss Pym’ and ‘Mr Larkin’ – but soon developed into a tone of genuine friendship and intimacy. Larkin, who had been introduced to Pym by his sister Kitty (‘the only clever thing to do with books she did in her life’), deeply admired Pym’s novels.[7] Larkin had a complicated personal life and both his lovers, Monica Jones and Maeve Brennan, were Pym fans.

  The correspondence began just after the publication of No Fond Return of Love. Larkin told Pym that he had given away his first copy and lent out his second. He sent Pym his impressions on a second reading: ‘I thought all the Devon part was splendid and it was nice to meet Wilmet and Keith again. There is something very special about these two: they are memorable not only in themselves but in their relation, as if Wilmet’s reward for her sins is this ridiculous unwanted incubus, or do I mean familiar.’[8] He particularly admired Wilmet and Keith’s unlikely friendship, despite – or because of – their love for the same man. In fleshing out Keith’s character, Pym had scribbled an entry in her notebook, which shows the extent of her profound understanding of the nature of human relationships – in this instance seeing the perspective of a homosexual man: ‘When I meet Keith I am surprised that he does not seem to be jealous, until it occurs to me that he does not need to be.’[9]

  Pym replied to Larkin: ‘poor Wilmet and Keith. I think incubus or familiar describes him very well.’[10] Hilary had been tidying her desk and found an old photograph album that reminded Barbara of a ‘lovely poem of Larkin’s. His “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album”.’[11] The poem, based on a true event in his life, shows the narrator wistfully looking through a photograph album that belongs to his lover. The images choke him with emotion, bringing back to life a girl in pigtails, clutching her cat, then a once ‘sweet girl-graduate’, and then her past lovers. The narrator is reminded of a past that he can’t be part of: ‘We cry, Not only at exclusion, but because/ It leaves us free to cry.’[12]

  Few writers have captured this profound sense of exclusion, of separation and loss, better than Larkin in his poems and Pym in her novels.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  No fond Return to Print

  With the new move to Queen’s Park, things were looking up. Pym’s work was beginning to reflect the changing times. Laurel, in No Fond Return of Love, sports a beehive hairstyle, wears mini-skirts and listens to rock’n’roll. Penelope in An Unsuitable Attachment is boho-chic, with quirky clothes. She too sports a beehive.

  The relationship between a working-class man and a middle-class woman also reflected the new age. In 1960, Princess Margaret married commoner Antony Armstrong-Jones. The service at Westminster Abbey was the first royal wedding to be televised. By 1960, 79 per cent of households, including the Pym sisters, owned a television set.[1] Pym wrote vividly, too, about bedsit land and the sadness and loneliness of town-dwelling far from supportive communities, whether they be church or village. She felt that she was adapting to what Prime Minister Harold Macmillan called the ‘Wind of Change’ that was sweeping across the time.[2]

  Philip Larkin would describe Pym’s new novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, as ‘the most solidly churchy’ of her books in terms of subject matter, but still typical of the ‘undiminished high spirits’ which characterised her early works. There is a melancholy undertow to it, however, which reflects the isolation of people and the disintegration of community life in post-war London.

  The novel is set around a north London parish. Sophia Angier is a vicar’s wife, who has married ‘beneath her’. Mark and Sophia Angier are childless, and she dotes on a beautiful but spoiled tortoiseshell cat called Faustina. Like Pym’s cat, Minerva, she has a golden streak down her nose, giving the effect of a beak. Faustina is given full rein at the vicarage, allowed to eat from their plates and to jump on the beds and furniture, scattering cat hairs wherever she lands. The vicar is first discovered buying plaice for all three of them in a fish and chip shop on the less salubrious outskirts of his north London parish, incurring the disapproval of an indomitable spinster, Sister Dew, a retired nurse:

  ‘Good evening vicar – been getting fish for pussy?’

  When he turned round, rather startled, the voice went on, ‘Oh, I know what you’ve got in the bag – you can’t hide anything from me!’ …

  ‘How you do love pussy,’ Sister Dew went on. ‘Only the other day I was at the vicarage, seeing Mrs Angier about my stall at the bazaar … and there was pussy bold as brass, if you please, walking into the lounge as if she owned it.’

  But she does, Mark thought, though he said nothing.[3]

  Sophia is a matchmaker and wishes to marry off her sister, Penelope, to an eligible young social anthropologist, Rupert Stonebird, who has moved into the parish. Penelope is a child of the sixties, with her beehive hairdo, false eyelashes and tartan trousers. But Sophia’s plans appear to be thwarted by the appearance of another new neighbour, a librarian called Ianthe Broome, who, as a canon’s daught
er, seems to be a rival for Rupert’s affections. Ianthe is tall and elegant and identifies herself as ‘an Elizabeth Bowen heroine – for one did not openly identify oneself with Jane Austen’s heroines’.[4]

  The chief librarian, Mervyn Cantrell, is a fussy, disappointed middle-aged bachelor who once aspired to a job in a university library, and lives with his disagreeable old mother. He appoints a new assistant, John Challow, a handsome young man with an intense gaze, who has previously worked as a film extra. Ianthe, a social snob, is attracted to John but suspicious of his pointed shoes, which are ‘not quite what men one knew wore’. She is surprised when she finds him reading a volume of Tennyson’s poems.

  Most of the characters in An Unsuitable Attachment are deeply lonely. Mark Angier feels displaced by his wife’s obsessive love for her cat. Rupert Stonebird is married to his work: his research is ‘extra marital relations in the Ngumu’, but he has little feeling for real human emotion. He would like a wife, but more as an adornment to his house. He knows that cool, elegant Ianthe is more suitable wife material, but he is sexually attracted to Penelope, whom he thinks of as a ‘pre-Raphaelite beatnik’.

  Once more, Pym uses the world of anthropology to depict the machinations of ‘civilised people’. Rupert as an eligible bachelor is an object of curiosity for the parish of St Basil’s, and he is observed as closely and as warily ‘as wild animals hidden in long grass’. At a dinner party, we meet again the egregious Everard Bone, now married to Mildred Lathbury. The guests discuss the life of the writer who writes the same novel over and over again and the anthropologist who reuses the same material, ‘like a housewife faced with the remains of yesterday’s stew and wondering whether it can possibly be eked out for another meal’. Everard tries to explain his philosophy: ‘Haven’t the novelist and anthropologist more in common than people think? … After all, both study life in communities.’[5]

  At Christmas time, the single people without children feel at their most lonely. Ianthe and Rupert return home from work to cold and empty houses. When Sophia dresses her Christmas cake, her only decoration is a rather sad, solitary figurine of Santa Claus. Her husband describes him as looking like ‘King Lear in the snow deserted by his daughters’.[6] Pym’s world is still peopled with splendid women, such as Sister Dew, who keeps herself busy with church life, and Daisy Pettigrew, who keeps a cattery in her basement. But there is also Miss Grimes, who lives in a single room in a house at the mercy of a nosy social worker who advises her to spend her pension on vegetables rather than the comforting Spanish wine she craves in the evening.

  It is not only at Christmas time that lonely people feel at their worst, but also when they are poorly with nobody to attend to their needs. When Ianthe is ill, she is visited by the vicar’s wife, and her neighbour, Rupert Stonebird, who fills her hot-water bottle. However, when John Challow falls sick, he has nobody, and Ianthe decides that she must pay him a visit. Pym’s attention to detail is immaculate. Ianthe visits John’s bedsit, bringing flowers and barley water, and sees that he is in bed. She is shocked by his squalid flat: the narrow bed with its cheap eiderdown, the dirty patterned rug, the chocolate brown linoleum.

  In one corner there was a sink and a gas ring, partly hidden by a screen, a pile of unwashed crockery on a small table and a red plastic bucket filled with empty tins, tea leaves and broken egg shells. Indignation surged up within her – that he should have to live like this.[7]

  In homage to Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, the action moves from cold, grim London to Italy. In Arnim’s novel, Italy is a magical place where cold marriages are rejuvenated, and love affairs are kindled. Likewise, Mark and Sophia drew closer together; not only in the heat of the sun, and the glories of Rome, but because, for once, Mark is not sharing his wife with Faustina. In an Italian garden, Rupert kisses Penelope. Ianthe and Sophia take a trip to Ravello to visit Sophia’s aunt. Ianthe is bewitched by the setting: ‘“It’s lovely,” she said. “It reminds me of The Enchanted April – wisteria and the roses”.’[8]

  In Italy, Ianthe is hit by the realisation that she loves John Challow. When she is probed by Sophia, she confesses her feelings. Sophia, knowing that John is both younger and socially inferior, is shocked by the unsuitable attachment (forgetting that she herself has married ‘down’), telling Ianthe that John ‘isn’t the sort of person one would marry’. She (lamely) tells Ianthe that ‘you’re one of those women who shouldn’t marry’ – that she should be a ‘splendid spinster’.[9] Later, Sophia thinks of Ianthe when, at the end of the evening meal, she unties a little bundle of lemon leaves, ‘leaf after leaf until the fragrant raisins were revealed at the centre’. The lemon leaves seem to be a suitable metaphor: ‘This process surely had something in common with uncovering the secrets of the heart, as Ianthe, aided by Sophia’s probings had uncovered hers.’[10]

  Sophia is convinced that marriage based on different social backgrounds can never be a success. But the world has changed. Social conventions have changed. Ianthe, despite the age gap, despite the class boundaries, and to the horror of most of her friends and family, does marry John Challow. Pym was again moving with the times. An Unsuitable Attachment ends happily, but a darkness reverberates in her depiction of loneliness, especially for the women who so often seem to draw the short straw. There’s a flash of the old Pym wit in the remark from vicar, Basil Branche, as he views the married couple: ‘“Imparadised in one another’s arms,” as Milton put it … “Or encasseroled”.’[11]

  Pym was satisfied with her work. She sent it off to Jonathan Cape, her long-standing publisher.

  Nothing could have prepared her for the blow of the rejection. When the letter arrived, cold and informal, with its clear indication that she was not going to be published in the near future, she was left devastated and humiliated. It evoked all of the rejection that she had endured in her life, from Henry Harvey to Gordon Glover and those in-between: ‘To receive a bitter blow on an early Spring evening (such as that Cape don’t want to publish An Unsuitable Attachment – but it might be that someone doesn’t love you anymore) – is it worse than on an Autumn or Winter evening?’[12]

  She had been, in her own words, ‘offloaded’. And the men responsible had not bothered to give her the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting or a telephone call. It was the most cowardly and cruellest of rejections and it affected her for a long, long time.

  Barbara Pym now entered what she would call her wilderness years.

  BOOK THE SIXTH

  The wilderness years

  CHAPTER I

  Miss Pym’s Annus Horribilis

  Nineteen sixty-three was the coldest winter on record for over two hundred years. The ‘Big Freeze’ began in December and ended in March. Bitter winds from the Arctic dipped temperatures far below zero, and in some parts of Britain the snow was over five feet deep. Roads and railways were blocked, villages cut off for days. Telephones and power lines were brought down, leaving people without electricity. It was so cold for so long that the sea started to freeze around coastal areas and icebergs were spotted in the Thames.

  The house at 40 Brooksville Avenue was freezing and sparsely furnished. There was no central heating. The Pym sisters had electric fires, coal fires in the bedrooms and a couple of paraffin stoves. Pym told Philip Larkin that she seemed to be endlessly crouched on her knees, filling the stoves. Even the toilets at St Lawrence’s church had frozen over. In February, the power lines had failed: ‘no heat from electric fires and no TV picture till 10.30 p.m. Luckily we have coal and paraffin too, though, and we managed to avoid frozen pipes and bursts which is a great blessing.’[1] The sisters had received a terrible shock with the news that their father was bankrupt and they had helped him out financially. Money was tight. Pym’s salary was meagre and now her writing career appeared to be over.

  Unsurprisingly, Pym’s outlook was bleak in this time. The bitter cold (‘frigid hostile air’) made her life a misery. Nineteen sixty-three was swiftly becoming her annus horribilis.
In February, the month when Sylvia Plath took her own life just three miles away, the house at Brooksville Avenue was burgled twice in quick succession. First time around, the thieves took jewellery and Hilary’s camera. When they returned the following week, they stole Pym’s typewriter, an electric fire and some silver.

  In the same month that Cape dropped Pym, the Beatles released Please Please Me. The four working-class lads from Liverpool were a breath of fresh air, defying the old-fashioned elite with their irreverent razor-sharp wit, mop-top hairstyles and catchy pop songs. Beatlemania had begun, and with it a cult of youth and working-class rebellion in which Pym’s world suddenly looked unfashionably middle aged and middle class – though she herself liked their records. Philip Larkin’s tongue-in-cheek poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ cited 1963 as the year of the invention of sex in the UK. In December 1961, the Minister of Health, Enoch Powell, announced that the oral contraceptive pill, Conovid, would become available by prescription through the National Health Service at the subsidised price of two shillings per month. Sexual intercourse without fear of pregnancy had begun, but rather too late for Barbara Pym.

  Meanwhile, as Larkin also noted in his poem, unexpurgated copies of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover were circulating freely as a result of the verdict in the infamous obscenity trial of 1960 (‘Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones had asked the jury in his opening statement). As publishers and readers felt newly licensed to take on sexually explicit material, the novels of Miss Pym suddenly looked prim. In America, the Kinsey Report, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, had led the way in suggesting that the bedroom could be a place where fun happens, rather than one’s duty. Now Britain was following along: 1963 saw the publication of UK editions of Helen Gurley Brown’s celebration of Sex and the Single Girl and Betty Friedan’s book that launched the second wave of feminism, The Feminine Mystique. Helen Gurley Brown’s manual, which stayed on the bestseller list for over a year, made her position clear: