The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Leonora ruthlessly evicts her tenant, an old lady who lives in her attic, so that she can move James in. She also goes to Phoebe’s cottage and takes back the furniture items she has borrowed. But all is not what it seems. James has met a man called Ned. Then one day, a young man appears at the door of Leonora’s beautiful house, where James is now installed as lodger in the attic. It is Ned. Leonora invites him in to tea. She realises that Ned is a far greater threat than Phoebe: ‘however charming he might appear this young man wanted to take James away from her and she was not going to let him’.[3] Ned and Leonora perceive that there can be only one winner in their battle for handsome James.

  Pym handles the narrative with great mastery. Though she allows the reader to guess that James is attracted by and to both men and women, the novel is seen through the eyes of Leonora, who is blinded by her own self-absorption and vanity. When she is finally forced to accept the truth of James’s sexual orientation, she accepts the battle and sets to it. Though James is bisexual, his primary attraction is to men. Leonora comes to the bitter realisation that she can only lose. She is ‘off-loaded’ by James. By the time Ned tires of James and sends him back, the relationship is severely broken – like a Sèvres vase that cannot be repaired.

  The plot is intricately and delicately managed, but the true genius of the novel is in the writing, which is rich with what Larkin called Pym’s ‘plangent quality’. She was taking a risk with Leonora, who is not a particularly likeable heroine and whose disposal of Phoebe is ruthless: she deserves the treatment she gets from Ned and yet when it happens, it feels tragic. Ned is perhaps Pym’s most sinister character. In a shocking scene, worthy of Henry James in its handling of tone and sinister undercurrents, Ned warns Leonora that she is up against a master. He picks up an alabaster dove – a present from James – and quotes from Keats: ‘I had a dove and the sweet dove died;/ And I have thought it died of grieving.’[4] Leonora remembers: ‘Ah, yes, of course, that sad little poem.’ She is ‘relieved that it was something so simple and harmless’. But she has forgotten the end of the poem and this is where Ned proves himself to be heartless:

  Ned passed his cup and went on with the verse, his voice lingering over the words and giving them a curious emphasis.

  ‘O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied

  With a single thread of my own hand’s weaving.’[5]

  Leonora’s ‘agitation’ is profound and she trembles. Later, in an ugly parody of the Wilmet/Keith/Piers triangle, Leonora visits Keats’s house with Ned and James and is rendered miserable by the way she is heartlessly treated. She is taken back to Ned’s ‘pad’ and her humiliation is complete when she is shown the exceptionally wide bed covered in mauve velvet. When she finally leaves, Ned congratulates James on having ‘shook off’ Leonora and describes her as a wounded animal ‘crawling away to die’. He ‘laughed in a light cruel way’. Then he tells James: ‘Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.’[6] It is a warning to James that he might be dispatched with the same ruthlessness. Ned is a game-player: ‘It had been amusing to see if he could get James away from Leonora … but now that he had succeeded what was he going to do about him.’[7] James is beautiful but weak, allowing himself to be used by the unscrupulous Ned, who finally tires of him and sends him back to Leonora. In a wish-fulfilment plot point, James does come crawling back to Leonora, but is rejected. Skipper, of course, did not come crawling back.

  When Ned visits Leonora to give James back to her, his cruelty reaches new levels. He almost reduces her to tears, which is his intention because ‘he was good at comforting weeping women’. If we are in any doubt that Pym was paying homage to Henry James, we are given a reminder:

  ‘You must forgive him,’ [Ned] went on. That was what women should do and even did, in his experience; they overlooked things, they took people back, above all they forgave.

  ‘But James hasn’t asked me to forgive him.’

  ‘He hasn’t? Really, Jimmie might have made things a little easier for him. I expect he will, though and you mustn’t be too hard on him. If he came to you his bended knees, surely you’d forgive him?’

  Leonora said nothing.

  ‘You mean he could come to the door and you wouldn’t open it – you’d let him go away? Like that scene at the end of Washington Square? Leonora, I’m sure you read Henry James, he’s so very much your kind of novelist.’[8]

  But Leonora, almost to her own surprise, manages to rise above Ned’s cruelty with a new level of self-knowledge and dignity: ‘she supposed she had acquitted herself quite well, perhaps she had won a kind of victory, but it hardly seemed to matter now’.[9]

  Pym vented her rage and frustration at Skipper’s betrayal and her own fallibility in falling for a young homosexual man who could never return her love. Leonora, with her sharp tongue, makes jibes at James’s ‘effeminacy’. She cooks him tarragon chicken, as Pym did for Skipper, and he reads aloud from a Sotheby’s catalogue, describing the beautiful objects. Leonora even wears Skipper’s cologne, L’Heure Bleue.

  Humphrey’s antique shop, like Skipper’s, is near Sloane Square. Beautiful objects in this novel are revealed to be flawed, with a chip here or there. Leonora borrows James’s antique fruitwood mirror: she loves it because it hides her lines and only reflects back her beauty. She buys James an expensive brace of porcelain vases as a bribe, just as she imprisons him in her attic, behind bars. She tells him that the bars are a relic of the days when the attic was once the nursery, but it is clear that James has also become a substitute child. When she gives him the precious vases, he feels like a child who has been stuffed full with too many cream cakes.

  We have seen before how Pym identified so strongly with her heroines that in her journals she often elides the first-person pronoun with the third. This slippage is even more pronounced in her journals for The Sweet Dove Died where paragraphs in Leonora’s chilly voice sit uneasily alongside Pym’s emotionally chaotic voice: ‘Bruised and sore’; ‘Only remember that you love Sk[ipper] that is all that matters’; ‘Today is so painful, I feel raw all over’; ‘no word yet since Saturday’; ‘All miserable again and determined to end it all … but how? And why?’; ‘I just sit tight and endure’.[10]

  Soon after she redrafted the final version of the novel, Pym made her pilgrimage to Jane Austen’s cottage in Chawton, Hampshire: ‘I put my hand down on Jane’s desk and bring it up covered in dust. Oh that some of her genius might rub off on me.’[11] She need not have feared. The novel she had finished was her true masterpiece, written at the height of her powers. That she did so when she had been cast asunder by both her publisher and her beloved is remarkable. If, as Philip Larkin had suggested, Some Tame Gazelle was her Pride and Prejudice, then surely The Sweet Dove Died was her Persuasion. Without the happy ending. It was dedicated to ‘R’.

  CHAPTER XIII

  Miss Pym feels her Age

  Jane Austen, the writer to whom Pym was most often compared, had her own years in the wilderness. Her first novel was accepted in 1803, but it gathered dust on a publisher’s shelf. It took another eight years for her to get into print. How frustrating it is that if only she had been published in 1803, we would have had many more Jane Austen novels. The same parallel could be made with Barbara Pym. If only The Sweet Dove Died had been accepted in 1969, then we would have had several more Pym novels. Like Austen, she kept writing, kept trying to get published, did not fully give up hope.

  In August, she sent The Sweet Dove Died to Longmans. They sent it back: ‘well written’ but not for them. ‘What’s the use of that?’ she wrote in her notebook.[1] She explained to Larkin that she had substantially rewritten the book, cut out the minor characters as he had suggested, made it less ‘cosy’, and composed some difficult final chapters which, to her mind, were her very best writing. Delighted, Larkin promised to speak to James Wright, the fiction editor at Macmillan. Pym took the manuscript along to Macmillan in person, ‘avoiding the expense and frustration of the Christma
s post’.[2]

  Pym had watched a TV programme about the dire state of fiction publishing. It depressed her and she felt that her chances were not good. ‘If only somebody would have the courage to be unfashionable,’ she lamented to Larkin.[3] James Wright at Macmillan sent her a long letter, rejecting the novel, but praising its ‘perfection of taste’. Pym told Bob Smith that she had never had such a flattering letter about her work, but, yet again, it was the fear of it being a ‘risky commercial venture’ in the present climate that prevented publishers taking on the book. Pym determined that she would keep sending it round. She thanked Larkin for his kind intervention and sent him a beautifully bound copy of A Glass of Blessings as a thank-you present. Wright’s letter had at least partially restored her confidence in her own talent.

  In April 1970, the publisher MacDonald rejected the novel. Pym decided she would send it out again under the pen name Tom Crampton, with the new title Leonora. That autumn, she submitted the novel to Peter Davies, a subsidiary of Heinemann, ‘completely out of the blue with no indication that I had written anything else’. One of its directors, a talented editor called Mark Barty-King, wrote back a long letter, quoting five readers’ reports, ‘some of which were very flattering’. One of the readers had described it as a ‘tour de force’, another ‘very accomplished’, but the consensus was that it was not powerful enough to appeal to a sufficiently wide public. On the other hand, one of the less kind reviewers thought the novel ‘clever-clever and decadent’. Pym was delighted by this backhanded compliment: ‘that made me feel thirty years younger!’[4]

  Philip Larkin offered his usual support, which Pym had come to rely upon. He wrote to say that he read all of her novels, every eighteen months: ‘How good they are!’ he told her. ‘How much what one wants after a hard, even a soft day’s work! How vivacious and funny and observant! And feeling of course. It seems fearful that you should be trying not to be “cosy” … if I could help by writing a foreword – an appreciation – of course I’d love to help.’[5]

  Bob Smith reiterated the belief that Pym should not try too hard to avoid cosiness. He was now teaching in Nigeria and working on a full review essay of Pym’s works, which he planned to pitch to Ariel magazine. He sent her an early version, which she found ‘most gratifying and soothing to my wounded ego’, but she found fault in some of his criticisms.[6]

  Pym was feeling her age. Her old publisher, Wren Howard, had recently died and she attended his memorial service. In Dublin, on holiday, she observed a ‘lone American lady drinking creme de menthe on the rocks to match her emerald ring and the other ladies so old and preserved enjoying exotic cocktails’.[7] She was beginning to see herself as one of them. Even John Lennon, whose music she had so enjoyed when he was just a loveable mop-top, was now ‘so repellent-looking-now – like a very plain middle-aged Victorian female novelist … I still like their songs, if I don’t have to look at them’.[8]

  Daryll Forde was retiring from University College London and Pym went along to his Festschrift presentation. She noticed the academic women who had made no effort with their clothes: ‘an enviable detachment and when will one ever reach it?’[9] Everywhere there was the sense of an ending. St Lawrence’s was in financial trouble and church members fewer and fewer. There was even talk of ‘meeting in people’s houses rather than going to church’.[10] She began to wonder if she should merely treat her novels as an older woman’s hobby, like knitting.

  Larkin sent her a copy of his latest book, All What Jazz, a collection of his music reviews. It left her in a reflective mood:

  The introduction set me thinking back into my own girlhood – and that winding up of the portable gramophone – and the records – ours were mainly of the bands of the day – Jack Hylton and Jack Payne, … and my own favourite of Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence doing that scene from Private Lives.[11]

  Larkin was on his way to Oxford (All Souls College, no less) for a six-month visiting fellowship, which also made Pym nostalgic: ‘I wonder if Elliston’s is now full of well-dressed ladies having coffee mid-morning? I think the warm green-muffled Cumnor Hills were never as Arnold saw them. But Bagley Wood – ah I think it belongs to St John’s doesn’t it and will have been preserved, bluebells and all.’[12]

  Pym’s beloved restaurant, the Kardomah, closed for good on 3 July 1970, as she carefully noted down. She visited the library at the London School of Economics. The sight of the students added to her feelings of impending old age: ‘Waiting down below at the enquiry desk – the rough students with long hair and strange one-sex clothes make me feel old and vulnerable.’[13]

  One of the most poignant themes of The Sweet Dove Died is the portrayal of a once beautiful woman growing old. The antique fruitwood mirror lent to Leonora by James is one of her favourite objects because its old glass reflects a kinder image than that seen in modern glass. It is cruel when James takes the mirror back and Ned comments how tired Leonora is looking and treats her like an infirm old woman. Pym was feeling this, too. In her notebook, she wrote of her string bag filled with books and ready-packaged food for one.

  In several of her novels, Pym makes a cameo appearance as herself, rather in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock’s brief appearances in his own movies. In The Sweet Dove Died, she makes two. One is the dreadful ‘Ba’ (Glover’s pet name for Pym), ‘toothy’ and ‘ruddy-faced’, who appears at a party and suggests that Leonora do voluntary work to fill her time. But the second cameo is heartbreaking. Pym drew on her own solitary pilgrimage to Keats’s house in Hampstead, on that soggy day when she had been so moved by Fanny Brawne’s engagement ring:

  All the same, the overcast skies and dripping rain spread a pall of sadness over the little house, with its simple bare rooms. There was nobody else looking over it except for a middle-aged woman wearing a mackintosh pixie hood and transparent rainboots over her shoes. She was carrying a shopping bag full of books, on top of which lay the brightly coloured packet of a frozen ‘dinner for one’.[14]

  Leonora at first looks with contempt at the unnamed woman, ‘for anyone who could live this way’. But then, given her own recent unhappiness, she feels a sudden stab of compassion: ‘She saw the woman going home to a cosy solitude, but her dinner heated up in twenty-five minutes with no bother of preparation, books to read while she ate it and the memory of a visit to Keats’s house to cherish.’ And then Leonora ‘caught a glimpse of her face, plain but radiant, as she looked up from one of the glass cases that held the touching relics. There were tears on her cheeks.’[15]

  The woman is, of course, Pym.

  CHAPTER XIV

  In trying Circumstances, Miss Pym compares herself to an Amazon

  At the close of 1970, Pym was still feeling low. There were some bright spots, such as a poetry event at the National Portrait Gallery, where she heard some of her favourite poems by Andrew Marvell. Also, news from Cape that Chivers of Bath wanted two further reprints, this time of Jane and Prudence and Less Than Angels. But there were moments of bleakness too, of ‘feeling old and vulnerable’.

  The new year began uneventfully. Pym was learning to drive, work was busy. Bob Smith told her that his review essay in the magazine Ariel would be published later in the year under the title ‘How pleasant to know Miss Pym’. In it he described her novels as ‘good books for bad days’ and played the Jane Austen card:

  Her works are miniatures, exquisitely, nearly perfectly done. But, beyond this, it is her wit and her sense of the ridiculous which make her books both delicious and distinguished. Above all, they must be ranked as comic novels, but the comedy is realistic and demonstrates again and again the happiness and merriment which can be found in the trivia of the daily round – that ‘purchase of a sponge-cake’ about which Jane Austen felt it proper to write to Cassandra.[1]

  Pym was grateful for the piece, but in her notebook her deep frustration was felt: ‘What is wrong with being obsessed with trivia? Some have criticised The Sweet Dove Died for this. What are the minds of my cr
itics filled with? What nobler and more worthwhile things?’[2]

  Other things began to fill her mind when she found a small lump on her left breast. Hilary was out of contact, away travelling in Greece again, but Pym was calm and pragmatic. Her doctor sent her straight to hospital, where the lump was found to be malignant: ‘Morning at St Mary’s Hospital Paddington. O little lump – almost a subject for a metaphysical poem.’[3] Afterwards, she took herself to a pub for a stiff drink.

  The hospital acted quickly and the following day they operated and removed her left breast. She wrote to Bob:

  Dearest Bob, I don’t know how to prevent this letter being a shock to you, as it has been to me … everyone has been marvellous and all those clichés about one’s true friends are proven right. Hazel a tower of strength, Mrs P. C. coming round with grapes, my friends at the Institute rallying round. You will guess it was cancer and that was why they took away the left bosom. I can’t make out whether the other ladies here are breastless (like Amazons?) or have other things the matter with them. Everyone is so kind – the black hands and white hands, so cool and firm and comforting.[4]

  Just a couple of weeks later, she was convalescing in the garden ‘in a rare burst of sunshine’. She wrote to Larkin that she had rather enjoyed the experience: ‘To have a lovely rest, to have flowers and grapes and books brought to you and to be a centre of interest is not at all unpleasant! I didn’t even mind the students looking at me.’ She told him that the lump was small and had been caught early, so she had hopes that there would be no recurrence, ‘though I suppose one mustn’t be over-optimistic’. Pym was in good spirits. She had liked speaking to the other patients: ‘I discovered all you need to do is to make some enquiry and you will get the whole life story.’ She was reading long novels again, those of one of her favourites, the prolific High Church Victorian chronicler of domestic life, Charlotte M. Yonge: ‘what a wonderful length books were allowed in those days before the telly and all that’.[5]