by Paula Byrne
Another admired author, E. M. Forster, had died the previous year, having failed to produce a novel for the last forty-six years of his life. He had felt unable to write overtly about his homosexuality and considered it would be hypocritical to go on publishing heterosexual love stories. His sexuality only became general public knowledge in the year after his death, when the novel, Maurice, written shortly before the First World War, finally saw the light of day. Pym read extracts from it that were serialised in the Sunday Times. To Larkin, she wondered what could possibly be regarded as too daring to publish nowadays. Prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, it had been easier for her, as a heterosexual woman, to create overtly homosexual male characters than it had been for Forster as a gay man.
Pym’s brush with cancer had made her more reflective and thankful. She was enjoying being away from the institute and told Larkin that she gave thanks for her recovery, in hospital, at home and in church. She acquired a false breast, considering it ‘a very fine shape indeed’. She felt that one of the compensations for growing old was not caring so much about ‘one’s physical beauty and of course [the prosthetic] doesn’t show at all when one is dressed’.[6]
Another change came in September, when St Lawrence’s church closed down. Pym began worshipping at St Mary Magdalene in Paddington. She liked the music and the amusing vicar who dragged on a cigarette. Meanwhile, she had used her convalescence to finish another novel. It was about ‘a provincial university’. Larkin was delighted at the thought of her turning her gaze on ‘redbrick academic life’.[7] She told Bob Smith that two of the characters – a mother and son – were exiles from the Caribbean, based on Skipper and his mother. She had few hopes of seeing it published, but wrote it for her circle of friends. ‘Prospects of publication seem to get bleaker,’ she told Larkin, noting that a woman had set up the Orlando Press – ‘erotic books written by women for women? What can they possibly be like? (I shall look out for them with interest).’[8]
Though she and Larkin had not yet met, their friendship was deepening. He was upset about her cancer: ‘A good thing you nobbled it quickly.’[9] He was going prematurely deaf and had invested in a hearing aid, which was prone to breaking. Always melancholic, he confided in Pym that he was depressed: ‘Has anyone ever done any work on why memories are always so unhappy?’[10] Larkin knew that he was certain of a kind and compassionate response from Pym. But on this occasion she did not agree with him: ‘When I’m unhappy or depressed I do find myself remembering better times.’ She was feeling hopeful and looking forward to the future: ‘I want to pass my driving test and I want to publish another novel … I am lucky.’[11]
CHAPTER XV
In which Holborn’s Renowned Department Store, Gamages, is demolished
Larkin had been rereading Excellent Women. He was yet again struck by its brilliance: ‘What a marvellous set of characters it contains.’ His own private life was, as ever, complicated. He was still torn between Maeve Brennan and Monica Jones – ‘the woman I want to marry and the woman I ought to marry’. He told Pym: ‘I never see any Rockys, but almost every young academic wife (I’m a shit) has something of Helena.’[1] Perhaps the portrayal of the weak, philandering Rocky Napier, who can’t seem to make up his mind whether to marry glamorous Prudence or cosy Jessie, was just too close to the bone.
Larkin had enjoyed Bob Smith’s review essay, with its ‘sober and sensible praise’, but he felt that the essay ‘not quite good enough, not as good as you deserve’. Smith ‘wallowed’ on too much about Jane Austen. Larkin memorably responded: ‘I must say I’d sooner read a new BP than a new JA!’ Larkin, usually so private and shy, now opened up to Pym about his dependence on alcohol, his constant weight battles and his problems with his mother (‘86 in January and soon after seemed to keel over’).[2] He shared details of life in a ‘provincial University’ that he hoped would encourage Pym to carry on with her own campus novel. She worked it through two drafts and then put it aside. It was published posthumously, stitched together from the drafts by her friend Hazel Holt, who gave it the title An Academic Question.
In many respects, it was a return to form, with some of the exuberance of Crampton Hodnet and Some Tame Gazelle. There are the dry one-liners such as: ‘Evidently a life spent with card indexes did not make for generosity of spirit.’[3] And there is a strong dose of gossip at the social gatherings of provincial academics. Someone suggests that Coco, the character based on Skipper, is mixed-race, due to his dark colouring and curly hair. Like Skipper in the Bahamas, Coco’s family have lived on a Caribbean island for centuries. Unlike Skipper, he has a degree from an obscure American university and a research fellowship in Caribbean Studies.
Caro Grimstone, the young heroine, is married to a university lecturer. She has abbreviated her name from Caroline to Caro in honour of Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron’s besotted stalker. She reads the Guardian and lives in a new-build neo-Georgian house with modern furniture. When a student turns up at her door, she expects she wants advice about contraception or abortion and is deeply shocked when the student asks to borrow her sewing machine. When Caro volunteers to read at an old people’s home, her husband asks her to spy on an old blind anthropologist, who has been a missionary in Africa and now keeps all his unpublished research in a large trunk in his room.
The university has a ‘new clean functional Senior Common Room’ and a refectory. There are lecturers in sociology and anthropology. All this reflects the expansion of higher education in Britain following the Robbins Report of 1963. In some ways, the university, in a West Country town, feels like a fresh start away from ‘the old intrigues and petty academic irritations’. In many ways it is a million miles away from Oxford, with its spires and crusty dons teaching Anglo-Saxon. But the academic rivalry is just as strong. Caro’s husband feels like a card in a game of patience, his moves blocked by cards of a higher suit.
Pym’s own frustrations with the academic life she witnessed via the African Institute and London University are revealed: the pettiness of the intrigues, the bullying and intimidation, the one-upmanship embodied in a lecturer called Dr Iris Horniblow – who bears more than a passing resemblance to Iris Murdoch, with her striking looks and thick square-cut short hair. Pym had met Iris and her husband John Bayley, who was such a huge admirer of the novels. Murdoch did not care for the novels, though she very much liked Barbara. Larkin had recently met Iris Murdoch at a party and told Pym that she asked him lots of probing questions. Iris Horniblow shocks Caro by asking her whether she believes in sex education.
The novel captures the foibles of academic bullshitters who are forever ‘preparing for publication’, arguing over footnotes, stealing each other’s research and complaining about their ‘crushing teaching load’. The head of department, Professor Maynard, two years off retirement, is clearly based on Daryll Forde. He shares Pym’s boss’s trait of asking of any young academic: ‘Is he able?’
Pym could not rid herself, however, of the nagging doubt that her love for quirky detail was out of kilter with the times. Publishers wanted either fast-paced bestsellers, such as Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, or demanding intellectual pyrotechnics of the kind displayed in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the library of the institute one day, Pym noticed a ‘Mr C’ eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, the sort of detail she would save for a novel: ‘Oh why can’t I write about things like that any more – why is this kind of thing no longer acceptable?’[4]
Being told by Sir Walter Scott’s venerable publisher Constable that a novel like The Sweet Dove Died was ‘virtually impossible’ to be published was another blow. ‘What is the future for my kind of writing?’ Pym wrote in her notebook. Again and again, she felt like giving up. Perhaps life would be easier if she did: ‘Perhaps in retirement and even in the year before, a quieter, narrower kind of life can be worked out and adopted. Bounded by English literature and the Anglican Church and small pleasures like sewing and
choosing dress material for this uncertain summer.’[5]
The appearance of two sisters in An Academic Question is another of Pym’s Hitchcockian cameos: ‘Two women who had just retired from jobs in London’, come to lunch when Caro is at her mother’s. ‘They were rather nice, spinster sisters.’ One is in her late fifties, the other just sixty. ‘Their lives were busy in an admirable way’: they speak of making alterations to the garden and plans for a motoring holiday in Shropshire. One of them, Caro feels sure, must once have been beautiful. ‘They must have loved in their time, perhaps loved and lost and come through it unscathed.’[6] Hilary had indeed retired from the BBC and Pym had just a year to go before she retired at the statutory age of sixty. The sisters were beginning to think about moving out of London to the country.
The prospect of being ‘buried in the country’ made Pym appreciate London, but she also felt that so much had changed. The Kardomah had gone, ‘so much is being pulled down, especially between Fleet St and Aldwych (By King’s College)’, and the African Institute was moving to High Holborn. The final straw was the demolition of Gamages department store: ‘Oh unimaginable horror!’ Pym went to the closing-down sale: ‘A dreadful scene with empty counters and tumbled merchandise and people walking about like zombies. This is the year of change and decay, though presumably shoe-box buildings will spring up on the site of decay.’ A ‘whole period of civilisation’ was going before her eyes.[7]
On warm days, Pym spent time convalescing in the garden, dozing on a deckchair. When she finally returned to work, it was in the institute’s cramped new premises in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum: ‘Now I wander around Bloomsbury, scene of so many and distant past glories. Who can ever live here now?’ The move gave her an idea for a new novel: ‘all old, crabby characters, petty and obsessive, bad tempered – how easily one of them could have a false breast’.[8]
She was to turn fifty-nine in the summer and once again was feeling her age, especially when she compared herself with the gorgeous young black women in the new office building. Although she put on a brave face to her friends and sister about the false breast, her surgery was inevitably life-altering. Every night, when she undressed for bed, she was forced to confront a different body to the one that she had known all her life. Pym was a woman who enjoyed sex. Ever since her Oxford days, she had been a sexually liberated woman – ahead of her time in her guilt-free, life-enhancing enjoyment of her body. Her private notebooks suggest that the mastectomy cut far deeper emotionally and psychologically than she dared admit:
The ageing white woman in the office. Besides the mysterious depths of the black girls, she has nothing, no depths, no mystery, certainly no sexuality. She is all dried up by the mild British sun, in which she may sit in a deck chair, eyes closed against its ravages.[9]
CHAPTER XVI
Miss Pym moves to Finstock
All those years ago, Pym had written a perfect comic novel about two middle-aged sisters living happily together in a cottage in the country. The sisters, Harriet and Belinda, were thinly disguised versions of Hilary and Barbara Pym. Now the prospect was coming true, much to the delight of their friends. The sisters had been searching in Oxfordshire and had finally settled on Finstock, fourteen miles north-west of the city of dreaming spires. Finstock was a typical Cotswold hamlet with honey-coloured stone houses and a village green. It lay close to the Wychwood Forest and not too far from Woodstock and the magnificent Blenheim Palace.
On a cold, windy and cloudy day, wrapped up warm, with a cat crouching on her desk, Pym wrote to Philip Larkin: ‘At least I shan’t be tempted to go and sit in the garden and sleep in a deckchair.’[1] She told Larkin that her plan was to live in London during the week and then go to Finstock at weekends and holidays. She planned to retire at the age of sixty, so had one more year working at the institute. Pym, a smoker since her university days, told him that she had finally given up cigarettes.
Barn Cottage was, as its name implied, a recently converted barn. It dated from the seventeenth century and was in the old part of the village, close to the green and the pub. There were old beams in every room, two bedrooms and a tiny spare room. It had an open-plan kitchen and sitting room, a downstairs bathroom and, much to Pym’s delight, a double garage: ‘Excellent for storing all those odds and ends we still haven’t been able to fit in.’ She told Larkin that she thought the new house much better than Brooksville Avenue. Tom the cat made quite a dramatic first appearance at a party for local ladies, when he appeared through the window, with a ‘not quite dead mouse in his mouth’.[2]
The village church, Holy Trinity, was famous for being the place where T. S. Eliot was received into the Anglican Church in 1927. ‘The church is not very High,’ Pym wrote to Larkin, ‘but there is quite an enthusiastic congregation of people who have come fairly recently to the neighbourhood. Hilary and I are a bit jaded and cynical about things like bazaars but try not to show it.’ The vicar had three churches to cope with: ‘not like the old palmy days of which I write in Some Tame Gazelle when every village had its own vicar or rector’.[3]
During the week, Pym rented a room, ‘with use of kitchen’, in Balcombe Street, near Marylebone station. On Fridays, she would leave the office early and take a train to Charlbury, where she would be picked up by Hilary. Thoughts of impending retirement gave her more inspiration for her new novel about office life and old people:
The death of a younger colleague – that could be part of my novel about old people … Love between a middle-aged man and woman (i.e. Jane and Nicholas in Jane and Prudence) has softened into mild kindly looks and spectacles. Now consider how it might be in the unmarried middle-aged women in the office. Both have had affairs of some kind but now can express love only through a tenderness and solicitude towards each other. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea.’[4]
Pym’s relationship with Daryll Forde had mellowed and he took her out for lunch to celebrate her twenty-five years with the African Institute. She told Bob Smith that she felt as if she and her boss were ‘two old people cleaving together’ in an alien new world. It came as a great shock to her soon after this when he had a heart attack at work one day and was ‘dead that same evening’.[5]
Thereafter the institute became a ‘rudderless ship’. It would never be the same without difficult, demanding, charismatic, Daryll Forde. More than ever, Pym longed for retirement, so that she could live quietly and write her novels. She had given up sending out her manuscripts (‘21 publishers is enough’). She would write for her own pleasure. Her notebooks were now filled with observations of country life: ‘the dead (dying) baby bat in the gutter with its chocolate brown fur … the dead bird, the dried-up hedgehog body, the mangled rabbit’.[6] She occasionally had thoughts of Skipper, especially when she wrote to their mutual friend Bob. She asked if there was any news of him, then stopped to remark how lightly she could write that now, as befitted a woman on the threshold of sixty. Being sixty had its compensations, she told Larkin, as she lay quietly in bed, writing her novel about ‘four people in their sixties working in the same office’.[7]
Forde’s unexpected death delayed Pym’s retirement, but London was no longer interesting: ‘All shops are now Travel or Photocopying or Employment Agencies, with the occasional Sandwich Bar.’ Not only was Gamages demolished, but also the old offices in Fetter Lane, where she had worked for twenty years: ‘The emotion that place saw will never be experienced in 210 High Holborn. Now flat – nothing but rubble and a deep wide hole in the ground.’[8]
Fetter Lane held memories of Skipper, who would be her last great love. Friendships, particularly with Bob Smith and Philip Larkin, were a lifeline for the literary part of herself. She had always had many female friends and now she had made new ones in Finstock: ‘Life is very full and the village is in many ways like Some Tame Gazelle.’[9]
Then in the spring of 1974, she suffered a minor stroke.
CHAPTER XVII
A Luncheon at the Randolph
Pym was in
Oxford’s Radcliffe Infirmary for the month of April 1974, recovering from her stroke, which the doctors confirmed was due to excess calcium in her blood and high blood pressure. One of the troubling side effects was a partial dyslexia, which affected her spelling – disastrous for a writer. She worked hard to regain her writing skills.
Philip Larkin, before he knew about her illness, sent her an inscribed copy of his latest collection, High Windows. The title was an allusion to his first-floor flat in Hull which looked out onto the park – something which Pym could appreciate, given her own first-floor drawing room in Queen’s Park and her Finstock bedroom, which opened out onto the flat garage roof with glorious views of the village beyond. Pym told Larkin that she didn’t mind at all being in hospital. She had met some interesting people there and, looking at the very old and infirm, she had thought to herself that perhaps it was best to die in one’s sixties. She could not bear to be incapacitated or disabled: it wouldn’t be possible to be a ‘splendid’ woman in such a condition, she wrote.
Though she was recuperating well, Pym was clearly still struggling to fully recover her writing and spelling capacity. Larkin was deeply concerned about her stroke, but glad that she had the benefit of ‘all the medical brains of Oxford to look after you’. He had bought ‘an ugly little house, fearfully dear, in a bourgeois area near the University’. He sent her the new address and added his usual words of encouragement: ‘I’m sure when you come home you’ll set to work on more brilliant novels, in which the unhappy months of this year will be caught up and transmuted.’[1]
