The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  In other news, Pym’s old haunt the Kardomah had been renovated. She bewailed the loss of the mosaic peacocks, which had made an appearance in her novels, and felt that the restaurant was losing its unique character. The company were ‘improving’ the ground floor, but were closing the basement, where Pym had spent many an hour in the company of Skipper: ‘Where now will we be able to read and write and brood? First the mosaic peacocks went, now this! What emotions are trapped in that basement.’[2]

  She wrote to Bob Smith to tell him that she had been at Sotheby’s on Skipper’s behalf: ‘Miss Pym is still frequenting the sale rooms.’ Although she had fun bidding and winning a book about the Bahamas, she told Bob that she was far happier at Hodgson’s book auctioneers in Chancery Lane, where ‘the prices were more realistic’.[3] Skipper was away and Pym found some solace in comfort-eating a creamy walnut cake: ‘Now Skipperless, one begins to understand “compensatory eating”. Better surely now to write the kind of novel that tells of one day in the life of such a woman.’[4]

  That Christmas, the Pym sisters entertained their friends and there was a party at the institute. Skipper went home to Lucky Hill and then on to Mexico for a holiday with his mother. He sent Pym a long affectionate letter, enclosing a nude photograph of himself swimming in the shallows of the sea. In Mexico, he wrote another letter mentioning that, coincidentally, at a Mexican church he had met an ‘acolyte’ called Richard Pym. It is impossible to know how physical the relationship between Pym and Skipper ever became, but there is no doubting the intensity of the friendship. It is not common for people who are just friends to send Valentine’s cards or nude photographs. But it was also a volatile friendship, with many angry quarrels and letters begging for forgiveness. Skipper’s feelings were confused not only by his homosexuality, but also because Pym was almost the same age as his formidable mother. Barbara, as Pym freely confessed, had a sharp tongue and would sometimes scold him.

  The new year got off to a bad start when Brooksville Avenue was burgled for the fourth time. On this occasion, the man came through the front window, but was spotted by a neighbour and fled the scene. Pym remarked, rather sadly, that there really wasn’t very much left to steal. Though she was sanguine about it, it left her feeling vulnerable.[5]

  Matters worsened when Skipper returned. On Valentine’s Day, he had sent her a card with the message: ‘I send you my heart.’ But then Pym learned that he had a new boyfriend, Gordon, who worked at the BBC. Skipper invited the sisters out to dinner to meet him:

  Hilary and I dined with Richard and Gordon at a Greek restaurant in Notting Hill Gate. Drinks first at 231. Gordon fortyish but dressed and coiffed in Beatle style. Has brought Richard a present of a drying cloth patterned with dachshunds. All the time they are, as it were, flirting with each other, a thing I hadn’t observed before.

  It was agony to be a witness to this burgeoning romance:

  I can only cling onto small details – Richard using the little Worcester sugar bowl I gave him to hold the olives and other times when he wears the scarf and gloves I gave him … In my bedroom, lonely at the weekend, I can look around and see the Victorian cup and saucer, the little glass bird, the plates he gave me and sniff the pomander on my bedside table.[6]

  Some months later, Pym mused in her notebook on what Skipper might be thinking about her, beginning by imagining his voice, then switching to her own:

  ‘Barbara is looking very strained – she’ll be going on holiday soon. Abroad, thank goodness – only postcards needed and the weather and complete change will do her good – perhaps she’ll fall in love with somebody (and out of love with me).’ But is that what he really wants? R was put on this earth to be loved – a great responsibility. He is evasive about Gordon. It occurred to me that he may want to protect him from my sharp tongue and ‘sending up’.[7]

  CHAPTER X

  Miss Pym is Off-loaded, again

  On a warm June day in Athens, Barbara Pym found herself sitting in the back seat of a car with her old love, Henry Harvey. A driver, ‘who looked like a younger, benevolent Stalin’, drove them on a winding route into the mountains, through the passage of Thermopylae and towards the ancient city of Lamia: ‘It seemed strange after more than 30 years to be driving with him again.’ Much had passed between them, but they had always managed to hold onto their friendship. Pym noted that she had heard a cuckoo as they travelled through Delphi. Sightseeing in Lamia, she noticed plastic doves being sold in the square, and ‘on the back corner of the Hotel Achillia there is a stork’s or pelican’s nest with young’.[1] Was she wondering, subconsciously, about an alternative life in which a stork had brought her and Henry a baby?

  Pym, who had once loved Henry so passionately, said little of her feelings on seeing him again – she was still consumed by Skipper. She was reading Anthony Powell’s The Soldier’s Art, the eighth volume of his epic A Dance to the Music of Time. Its theme of separation and unexpected loss suited Pym’s mood. She told Bob Smith that it was a great comfort and that she found it a beautiful book. What she didn’t know was that Powell was a great admirer of her novels and would discuss them in detail with John Bayley.

  Pym’s friend, Ailsa, went to the Bahamas and met Richard’s mother at Lucky Hill. This only emphasised the fact that Pym had never been invited to meet his family. Ailsa told Pym that Lucky Hill was fabulous: ‘It gave me a pang to think of her seeing all this.’[2] Once back in London, Skipper sent a letter asking if they could meet on her birthday, but she was no longer ‘Darling’:

  My dearest Barbara, A letter is always safer at times like these. I do pray all our clouds have rolled away and that we can meet on your birthday as planned. What would you like – a party or just dinner for two somewhere or perhaps something more imaginative? Do let me know. With much love, Skipper.[3]

  Pym dreamt about him. In one dream he was driving, and she realised that he was too drunk to be at the wheel: ‘You shouldn’t have let him get like this. Then I pick R up in my arms and he turns into a cat.’[4]

  Skipper sent a dozen pink Constance Spry roses and a tender note, then left for Spain. In August, after a wet, depressing day, Pym reconciled herself to another period of absence followed by ‘a possible approach in September (to get jumble)’. Meanwhile, she was shaken by another local church sex scandal involving a vicar and choirboys. She made a joke about it to Bob: ‘“Choirboys in the Study” might well be the title for something, maybe a musical … I suppose it was hushed up and he was given another chance. What was his wife like?’[5]

  That month Pym attended a dinner in Malvern given by the Writers’ Circle. She was struck by the women in long glittering brocades and fellow novelist Margaret Drabble ‘in a beautiful short flowered dress with long sleeves’. Again, she felt dowdy, as she had done in her black dress at the Athens dinner with Elizabeth Taylor. As so often, she chastised herself for being out of sync: ‘All with neat little “evening bags” – only B.P. with her black leather day handbag.’[6]

  In September, she wrote to Bob, referring to his leave in England that summer: ‘I hope your lunch with Richard was a success and that you didn’t have to drink weak white wine. I have had no word from him so I suppose I must make an approach myself if I want to get all that rich assortment of jumble.’[7] Perhaps, Pym suggested, she would be on better terms with Skipper in her old age. When he duly turned up with jumble for the church sale, they were ‘friendly, of course, but no longer en rapport’. She told Bob that she would send him a birthday card, ‘but if he doesn’t want to see me, that’s that’. Then she quoted Keats: ‘If it comes not as easily as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.’ And she hinted at the real source of her frustration: ‘And how does he manage all these people in his life, poor boy.’[8]

  However, she did go to Skipper’s birthday party on 26 October, after which she noted in her diary:

  The birthday party – when all these people come bringing gifts and tributes, some presented to him, others lying discreetly i
n the hall. Books, paté, liqueur chocolates, drink, objects, things to wear like scarves and gloves and pyjamas. Bulbs in a bowl … It was a great gathering together of his friends and lovers, past, present and future. Interesting to speculate which had been which.[9]

  She was going to have to be content reverting to her role as the observer of love, not the participant.

  A few weeks before Christmas, Skipper telephoned and asked her to lunch. Although the meal went well, she suspected that it was a farewell meeting and that she would see very little of him in the new year. He had moved into a new flat, in Rutland Gate, which she thought was much less nice than Sussex Gardens. Hilary – who, after the way he had treated Barbara, had developed an intense dislike of Skipper – was scornful when her sister told her about seeing his new flat – ‘Rutland Gate!’

  By the end of the year, Skipper had disappeared. Bob Smith assured Pym that he would be back before long, but she knew it was over:

  As for news of R, I fear it is all over now – he did get in touch once but I think it was only because he wanted to get rid of some jumble … Life has its farcical moments and perhaps my sense of humour is greater than his. Perhaps my sardonic tongue has sent him away or he has just lost interest, the latter probably.[10]

  She concluded, using the same term she had applied to her rejection by Cape, that: ‘It would now seem that he has definitely off-loaded me, which I think he has been trying to do ever since he came back from Mexico earlier this year.’[11]

  ‘All I want now,’ she told Bob, ‘is peace to write my unpublishable novels.’[12]

  CHAPTER XI

  Mr Larkin to the Rescue

  Philip Larkin had confided in Pym that he was experiencing writer’s block: ‘Poetry has deserted me.’ Once again, he was reading all her novels in succession, ‘& once more found them heartening & entertaining – you know there is never a dull page … really, they are entirely original’.[1]

  Pym would distil her feelings of rejection into The Sweet Dove Died. The endless waiting for the telephone to ring; the feelings that one has been thrown over. By the end of the year, she had finished her first draft. She told Larkin it was a book about an older woman in love with a younger man and that she had left out ‘boring cosiness’ in favour of ‘the darker side’. A friend had described it as ‘almost a sinister and unpleasant book’.[2]

  Larkin offered to read the manuscript. She posted it a month later: ‘I am sending The Sweet Dove Died (a thriller about the American Presidential Election?) for you to read and hope it may give you some amusement.’[3] He paid her the best compliment of all by reading the manuscript carefully, making valuable edits and suggestions, as Jock Liddell had done all those years ago with Some Tame Gazelle. Larkin told her that he found the novel a ‘curious mixture of successful and unsuccessful’. The characters were strong, he felt, but their destinies were not clear: ‘they move briefly and jerkily, & without any sense of inevitability’. He advised her to omit all the minor characters and focus on the main ones. He also expressed his sense that this novel had more ‘feeling’, but ‘it is only potential’. His comments were accurate and acute: ‘I think it could be a strong, sad book, with fewer characters and slower movements.’[4]

  It is a mark of Pym’s good sense and gratitude that she took Larkin’s advice on board. Even though she had had several rejections for the book, she felt that nobody had told her ‘what was really wrong with the book and I felt there must be something’. She explained to Larkin that the novel had begun as one thing and become another. Her busy life at the institute meant that she had had to stop and start and she felt that this lack of continuity had affected the writing. Her feelings had changed towards her central character: ‘I started not at all in sympathy with Leonora, who began by being a minor character, but as the book progressed I got more interested in her and really enjoyed writing about her the best in the end.’ She had ‘lost confidence’ and felt ‘uncertain of herself’. She also admitted that she was so tired from her day job that she often slumped in front of the television in the evenings: ‘What a mixed blessing that great invention is.’[5]

  Two of her novels, Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women, were being republished for a Library Association reprint by Chivers of Bath. This was some compensation for the fact that one of the main reasons for Pym’s many rejections was the closure of the commercial circulating libraries, where for a small fee readers could rent out books at a time when buying books was still costly. This had been the key not only to Pym’s own voracious consumption of fiction as a young woman, but also to her wide readership back in the fifties. She concurred with the sentiments of John Betjeman in his 1940 poem ‘In Westminster Abbey’, where Boots’ lending library is placed first in a list of British national emblems, ahead of ‘country lanes,/ Free speech, free passes, class distinction,/ Democracy and proper drains’.[6]

  Pym had, since school days, subscribed to Boots, but in 1966 the library closed following the passage of the Public Libraries and Museums Act of 1964, which required councils to provide free public libraries. Many publishers believed that Pym’s novels would not sell in the new market and without the support of the subscription libraries. Larkin had warned Pym of the changing climate: ‘I’m told that the economic figure for novels is 4,000 – and has risen a lot recently. The circulating libraries are diminishing, too – Smith’s gone, Boots going.’[7] Now she hoped that the Library Association reprints might suggest that her star was rising again. It would be another nine years, however, before she could find a publisher willing to take her on.

  Pym was mildly resentful that Jock Liddell was still getting published. His latest novel, An Object for a Walk, featured versions of herself and Henry: ‘Naturally, I could detect bits of myself in Flora … Poor Henry, what an inspiration he has been.’[8] She seemed to take a dusty view, telling Bob that the book had ‘meagre reviews’ and been met with a ‘lack of enthusiasm’. She was extremely busy with work at the institute, for which she was glad: ‘All the same it has helped me overcome the depression that occasionally threatens when I think of nobody wanting to publish my novels and my total failure … with Richard.’[9]

  Skipper continued to send postcards and a birthday card in June, but he had made it clear that he did not want to see her again. There were times when she was tempted to pick up the telephone, but managed to resist. She stalked his house, seeing if his car was parked outside. She debated whether they could ever be friends again: ‘Yet I feel like a cat that’s been offered a dish of plain Kit-e-Kat and wonders if it really wants that.’[10]

  A trip to Oxford with Bob Smith went horribly wrong when she ‘let fly about Richard which rather spoiled things’. Thinking of Skipper caused her acute ‘nervous indigestion pain’.[11] She told Bob that it was: ‘So unflattering to feel that a person really doesn’t ever want to see you again – I don’t think it’s ever happened to me before quite like this! Now, alas, I am too old to change myself.’ She resolved to herself to be more cautious in future: ‘not allowing myself to get fond of anybody’.[12]

  Perhaps, she might have added, not allowing herself to fall in love with a much younger homosexual man, who was incapable of returning her love, even had he wanted to do so. In private, she felt humiliated by the failure of the relationship: ‘Trying to understand people and leaving them alone and being “unselfish” and all that jazz has only the bleakest of rewards – precisely nothing!’[13]

  Nevertheless, encouraged by Larkin, she went back to The Sweet Dove Died and made all the changes he suggested. Pym poured out all her frustration, her embarrassment, and her humiliation at the hands of selfish Skipper. And, in her novel, she did not shy away from his sexual orientation. In a masterful stroke, she would increase the heroine’s despair by making the (anti-)hero bisexual and the subject of three people’s desire: an older woman, a young girl and a homosexual young man. Who would win?

  CHAPTER XII

  In which we read Miss Pym’s plangent Masterpiece, The Sw
eet Dove Died

  In response to a note asking her to write the jacket blurb for The Sweet Dove Died, Pym wrote: ‘What is it about? The struggle of two women, unknown to each other, to get a young man who doesn’t want either of them.’[1] What the young man wants is another young man.

  The heroine is a middle-aged, attractive, elegant spinster called Leonora Eyre. She is in the autumn of her life and wears beautiful clothes in autumnal hues of aubergine and green. During an auction at a Bond Street sale room she faints and is rescued by an antique dealer (Humphrey Boyce) and his much younger nephew (James). Humphrey, a widower, is attracted to the ‘exquisite’ Leonora, but she is drawn to ‘strikingly handsome’ and much younger James. He in turn is drawn to her, despite the age gap: ‘Her wide-brimmed hat which cast fascinating shadows on a face that was probably beginning to need such flattery. He was attracted to her in the way that a young man may sometimes be to a woman old enough to be his mother.’[2] But James is also attracted to a young woman, Phoebe, whom he has met at a party. Taking her out to dinner, he learns that she is editing the literary work of a girl who has died, Anthea Wedge. James later visits Phoebe in her cottage in the country and they fall into bed, almost to his surprise.

  When James leaves to go abroad, he offers Phoebe a loan of some of his furniture, which is stored in a repository. When she goes along, she discovers that another woman, Leonora Eyre, has also been there to take some pieces (just as had happened with Pym and Joan Wales). Phoebe is intrigued by Miss Eyre. In the meantime, Humphrey tells Leonora that James has a mistress in the country. Though she is shocked, she remains calm and swiftly plans to dispose of her rival, Phoebe.

  In the meantime, Leonora attends a dinner party given by a work friend, Meg. She has become obsessed by a camp young man (Colin), who has a series of disastrous relationships with different men, always returning to Meg with his tail between his legs. Leonora, cool, controlled, aloof, despises Meg, who devotes herself to Colin and his hapless lovers. She does not yet know that she will suffer in the same way.