by Paula Byrne
Hilary drove Pym to Balcombe Street to collect her things and her unfinished manuscript of the ‘older people’ novel. By now, Pym felt that she would never be published. Even an article that she had written about the subject and sent to The Author magazine had been rejected, which seemed to be ‘the final accolade of failure’. But she carried on writing every day, feeling guilty if she had read instead of written in the morning: ‘They say Graham Greene writes only 250 words a day, so I should be able to manage that.’[2]
Her health slowly improved and she returned to London for her retirement party on doctor’s orders to take it easy and not become ‘too emotionally excited’. She was given a lunchtime party with wine and food and a present of the Oxford English Dictionary (which she had requested) and a cheque. She bought herself a large gold topaz ring, worthy, she thought, of Edith Sitwell.
Pym was enjoying her retirement. The institute now seemed such an alien place, with unfamiliar staff and a new, younger director. She had agreed to be a judge for the Romantic Novelists Association and now had the leisure time to read the novels on the list: ‘They are extremely varied in type – some historical, others more purely romantic in a modern sense. The one thing they lack is humour or irony – and of course one does miss that.’[3] Christmas in Finstock was mild and windy, but there was entertainment with neighbours: ‘ginger wine and duck’. And she relished her proximity to Oxford. In the early new year, she revisited her old haunts: ‘a walk in the churchyard in Banbury Road, all almonds and prunus in the early sun’.[4]
But even Pym’s beloved Oxford had changed. Where she once had tea in Fuller’s or Elliston’s, she now had ‘beef burger, baked beans and chips’ in Selfridges. There was ‘no smoking’ in the Radcliffe Camera. The Randolph Hotel was still the same, and it was there that she arranged to meet up with Philip Larkin. It would be their first ever face-to-face encounter, after a long correspondence of nearly fifteen years. They would have lunch. Pym told Larkin to look out for a woman who was ‘tallish with short dark hair … I shall be wearing a beige tweed suit or a Welsh tweed cape, if colder. I shall be looking rather anxious, I expect.’[5] Larkin responded with his usual dry wit: ‘I am tall & bald & heavily spectacled & deaf, but I can’t predict what I shall have on.’[6]
In the event, it was a sunny day and the lunch went very well. Larkin gave many compliments, though Pym was her usual humble self and was reluctant to talk about her work. Their meeting was ambushed by a jovial ‘red-faced’ stranger who attached himself to the couple and chatted to them for what seemed like hours. In response to Larkin’s urgings that she should continue to write, she said that she would try and get on with something.
Larkin told a friend that he had finally met B. Pym. ‘It was quite successful (what an odd word “quite” is – “he is quite dead”, “this is quite good”) but she didn’t want to talk about work – hers – much.’ Though both Pym and Larkin were at heart rather shy people, the meeting served to further strengthen their bond. He did, however, find her an almost comical figure: ‘She was a kind of J[oyce] Grenfell person, if one can say that in a friendly way.’[7]
CHAPTER XVIII
The Kissinger Syndrome and the Return of Henry Harvey
On a winter’s evening in Finstock, two elderly ladies in full evening dress made their way to a neighbouring cottage where they had been invited to supper by a young man who worked for Oxford University Press. His name was Paul Binding. He was a budding writer and a former student of Professor Lord David Cecil, who had encouraged him to read Pym’s novels. When he discovered that Pym was a neighbour he invited her to supper, but he was shocked to see the sisters so finely dressed on his muddy front doorstep.
He found Pym ‘socially awkward and badly dressed’, clever and well informed, though he preferred the more lively Hilary. Barbara, he recalled, ‘made me feel that strong dividing line between men and women’.[1] He remembered her anger over Cape’s rejection. He also detected a suppressed depressive side. Nevertheless, they became friends and in due course Paul Binding would be the one to break the exciting news of the appearance of her name in the seventy-fifth anniversary issue of the Times Literary Supplement.
Larkin’s encouragement inspired Pym to carry on with her ‘retirement’ book. It would, she thought, be ‘austere and plain’.[2] The twenty-eighth of July, her mother’s birthday, was a time for reflection: ‘She would have been 88. Oh the mystery of it all – life, death and the passing of time.’[3] Pym was troubled by a moment of aphasia (memory loss) at a party, when she failed to remember the name of ‘Dr Kissinger’. She was embarrassed and worried about how disconcerting it was for the other guests. Later, she felt ‘pins and needles’ in her right hand and a temporary loss of eyesight. She started calling these moments the ‘Kissinger Syndrome’ and worried that it was affecting her writing: ‘Is this why I am now incapable of finishing this novel that is so near its end?’ Her medication (a beta-blocker) was increased: ‘In the Library I read the effects it might have – so if you have nausea, diarrhoea, insomnia and generally feel a bit odd, it’s just the Propranalol!’[4]
In the meantime, there was news from Jock, who had been recovering from an eye operation. He was very upset that his dear friend, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, had died. Pym was disheartened to hear that the press took very little notice of Taylor’s death: ‘After all, she was a friend of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard who are well in with the media.’ It made Pym think of her own posterity: ‘Still what does it matter, really, such writers are caviar to the general, are they not and fame is dust and ashes anyhow.’ Pym told Bob Smith that she was trying to finish the novel, ‘but that will be it, positively no more’.[5]
That year brought more deaths. Gordon Glover passed away and then Rupert Gleadow. Pym wrote to Bob: ‘Two of my contemporaries have died – both men. I should have been a widow twice over by now if I had married either.’[6] She built a bonfire and destroyed her ‘Gordon Glover’ diary of 1942: ‘The person who inspired the main reason for it is now dead.’[7]
The death of Glover hit her hard. Over lunch in a neighbouring village, she thought back upon his web of amorous affairs. Meanwhile, her greatest love, Henry Harvey, came back into her life. Now twice divorced, he had moved back to England, living at Willersey in Gloucestershire not far from Pym. He came to tea, ‘with a bad cold and bringing crumpet’.[8] One late evening, Henry returned to Finstock uninvited, tapping on the window. This gave a fright to the Pym sisters, who had recently heard of a burglary and murder of an elderly lady in a neighbouring village. Pym wrote to Henry to explain about the murder and their fear of opening doors to strangers at night. It was a reminder of how vulnerable they felt, especially at night when the village was so dark and quiet. She told him that she planned a holiday to Greece with Hilary and that she still took great pleasure in novel writing, ‘even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms’.[9]
There was more distress to come with the death of their beloved cat, Tom: ‘He just quietly expired on a copy of The Times one Saturday morning. When he died, the fleas left his body.’[10] But they still had Minerva, the brindled tortoiseshell.
Larkin came to Barn Cottage for tea and they walked to the church to see the T. S. Eliot memorial. ‘So two great poets and one minor novelist came for a brief moment (as it were) together. Philip took photos of us all with two cats outside the cottage.’[11] Though the relationship between Pym and Larkin was not at all romantic, they were in many ways kindred spirits. Philip was wonderful company – funny and droll and always encouraging. He told her about the mutual Pym fans he had met at parties and literary events. He was a restorative to her spirits and she deeply appreciated his friendship.
In the previous year, she had confided in Larkin her feelings of failure: ‘Here I am sixty-one (it looks much worse spelled out in words) and only six novels published – no husband, no children.’[12] Larkin replied with his usual support and good sense: ‘Didn’t J Austen write six novels and not have a
husband or children?’[13] At least Pym had managed to finish her novel, which she gave the working title ‘Four Point Turn’. She sent it to the publisher Hamish Hamilton and got the expected response. ‘The embarrassment of being an unpublished novelist knows no bounds,’ she wrote.[14] Rather pathetically, the only literary consolation of the year 1976 was the publication of a large-print edition of Some Tame Gazelle, aimed at the public library market for older readers with failing eyesight.
Pym had endured breast cancer and the mutilation of her body; had a stroke, which caused the temporary loss of the writing facility that meant the world to her; had suffered the death of lovers and friends and a beloved pet. And her literary career seemed irrevocably over. But her life was about to change in the most unexpected of ways.
BOOK THE SEVENTH
In which the fortunes of Miss Pym are reversed
CHAPTER I
A Real Pym Year
Early in the new year of 1977, Pym read the letters of Sylvia Plath. She was surprised to discover how likeable she was: ‘All these years I seem to have misjudged her – the kind of person she seems to have been – dates with Amhurst boys and at Cambridge … And liking clothes and hair-dos.’ Pym was also moved by Plath’s feelings of despair and isolation: ‘alone in that bitter Winter of 1962–3 in a house in Fitzroy Rd – where Yeats lived – with two young children, starting to write at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning – deserted by Ted Hughes – that was how it was’. Pym asked Larkin if he knew Ted, saying that his desertion of Plath ‘put her against’ Hughes. Her feelings of gloom persisted. At church there was only a tiny congregation ‘and ought not the Christmas decorations to have been taken down? A lapsed Catholic is no good to man or beast.’[1]
Nevertheless, she continued to work at Four Point Turn, adding two extra chapters. She had shown the novel to Larkin in manuscript. He had advised her to make it longer and to rename it: ‘I think the title Four Point Turn a little smart for so moving a book; it needs something sadder, more compassionate.’[2] Bob Smith also had advice. He wanted more of ‘Norman’, one of the four main characters, so Pym added some ‘bits’ about Christmas. But she felt in her heart that she would not be published again. She was part of the old world, not the new. ‘Life in 1977,’ she wrote to Bob: ‘Concorde, costing I don’t know how many millions, flies over our heads, clearly visible from our cottage windows, while the road outside is as full of potholes as in the 16th century.’[3]
Then, on 21 January, her life changed almost overnight. In celebration of its seventy-fifth anniversary, the Times Literary Supplement asked a wide array of writers to name the most underrated and most overrated authors or books of the past seventy-five years. Barbara Pym was the only writer to be named twice.
Philip Larkin wrote in the TLS (immediately above a curious recommendation by Vladimir Nabokov of a minor novel by H. G. Wells): ‘The six novels of Barbara Pym published between 1950 and 1961, which give an unrivalled picture of a small section of middle-class post-war England. She has a unique eye and ear for the small poignancies and comedies of everyday life.’ And, even more flatteringly (placed between the recommendations of the maverick psychoanalyst R. D. Laing and the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen), Oxford University Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature, Lord David Cecil, nominated: ‘Barbara Pym, whose unpretentious, subtle, accomplished novels, especially Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings, are for me the finest examples of high comedy to have appeared in England during the past seventy-five years.’[4]
Paul Binding read these accolades as he sat at his desk at the Oxford University Press. After work, driving home through January rain, it occurred to him that the Pym sisters might not be subscribers to the TLS. He phoned Barbara when he got back to Finstock. No, she did not take the TLS. ‘There is something of great import for you,’ he told her.[5] Later, Larkin assured Pym that there had been no prior collusion between him and Lord David.
A story ran on the front page of The Times the very next morning. Headlined: ‘How are the mighty fallen – according to the critics’, it began with the famous names cited among the ‘most overrated of the last seventy-five years’: E. M. Forster and the historian Arnold Toynbee were the clear winners in this ignominious category, closely followed by Virginia Woolf and Sigmund Freud. But:
There was a much wider spread of opinion on the most underrated authors of the century. The only name to emerge twice was that of Barbara Pym, whose six novels published between 1950 and 1961, and now available only in public libraries, were considered under-appreciated by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil. Jonathan Cape said last night they might consider a reprint.[6]
It was the first time that Miss Pym’s name had appeared in the pages of the national ‘newspaper of record’ since June 1958, nearly twenty years before, when Jonathan Cape had included A Glass of Blessings in a block advertisement for their latest titles (just above the highlight of their list: Ian Fleming’s latest James Bond novel, Dr No). David Cecil sent a characteristically modest note: ‘I learnt to my horror that your books are out of print and that some are unpublished. I do hope that my words and Philip Larkin’s will do something to remedy this lapse … May I say again, how much I admire your books, with what pleasure I read and re-read them.’[7]
All of a sudden, Pym was hot news. Radio Oxford came for an interview; letters poured in from friends, and the telephone rang constantly. Pym noted that, despite the quotation forced out of them by The Times, there was no word from Jonathan Cape. ‘Having just rejected my last novel what could they say, indeed?’ It must have been a delicious moment. Eventually they wrote to say that ‘they might consider’ some reprints. ‘That’ll be the Frosty Friday,’ she remarked, drily.[8]
Best of all was the news that came from Macmillan. The new novel was now renamed Quartet in Autumn. This time, there was no dusty rejection letter saying she was out of date and unpublishable. Senior fiction editor Alan Maclean, whose authors included Rebecca West and Muriel Spark, telephoned Pym saying that ‘they would love to publish the novel’.[9] He told her that he would confirm by post. She wrote to Larkin:
Dear Philip,
I haven’t dared to write to anyone until I actually saw it in print … but now I have the letter before me and it seems from this that you know (perhaps?), so this is just to express my inadequate thanks … If it hadn’t been for you and sending it to Pamela HJ [the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, who was well connected at Macmillan] … not to mention, all those years of encouragement. What can I say that would be at all appropriate?[10]
Larkin was ecstatic. He cracked open a bottle with Monica and wrote a congratulatory letter by return of post: ‘Super news! I am drinking (or, come to think of it, have drunk) a half-bottle of champagne in honour of your success. Monica and I are really deeply happy about it: we look forward to publication day as if it were our own … Oh I am so pleased: I want a real Pym Year.’[11]
Larkin was to get his wish. It was indeed a ‘real Pym Year’. BBC Radio 4 planned to read Excellent Women on Story Time. Larkin wrote a piece about the novels for the TLS entitled ‘Something to Love’. This article helped to establish Pym as an important novelist, with hidden depths behind the perfect comedy. Cape, with their tails between their legs, wrote to say they would like to republish all of her novels. Pym was particularly pleased that the senior editor, Tom Maschler, who had been her chief ‘blocker’, wrote to her personally. Naturally, he wanted to publish her latest novel. ‘It was,’ she told a journalist (‘with evident and rather sharp relish, reminiscent of Pym women’), ‘very sweet to me’ to tell Maschler that Cape had previously rejected it, so she had decided to publish with Macmillan.[12]
Pym and Hilary celebrated with sherry and whisky. They chatted about the upcoming festivities for the queen’s silver jubilee. The Finstock residents gathered to discuss their plans. Pym imagined that similar meetings had been taking place all over the country in dark village and parish halls, with the same jumble of ide
as. She had always loved spring, and her notebooks were suddenly full of new life and opportunity, as bulbs sprouted in the garden. The season evoked her happiest memories, such as her time with Julian Amery in Oxford.
CHAPTER II
Tea with Miss Pym
Pym’s delight in her new status was infectious. She was taken out to lunch with Alan Maclean and James Wright from Macmillan. She found them ‘sympathetic and congenial’. They wanted to publish The Sweet Dove Died as well as Quartet in Autumn. Pym was being given what she had longed for all those years: attention and kindness. Her sense of humour had returned. She told Larkin that she and her sister had exacted their own particular revenge on Cape: ‘Hilary and I invented a Maschler pudding – a kind of milk jelly.’[1]
Pym was deeply grateful to Philip and invited him to a splendid lunch of kipper pâté, followed by veal with peppers and tomatoes, pommes Anna, and celery and cheese. They drank sherry and burgundy. Pym found Larkin ‘shy but very responsive and jokey’. They had their photograph taken together before he left in his pale tobacco-brown Rover. Jock Liddell was equally delighted by her success: ‘Now someone can write a thesis on “Barbara Pym – the silent years”. Ultimately I think our kind of books date the least – and the once “up-to-date” is speedily “out-of-date”.’[2]
In May, Pym visited another of her champions, Lord David Cecil. They met at his home in Dorset for tea. She found Cecil and his wife easy to talk to, the time flying by. In a comfortable, agreeable room with green walls and fine family portraits, they sipped Lapsang Souchong and ate brown toast with redcurrant jelly and ginger cake. Cecil was full of praise and told Pym that her novels, along with Anthony Powell’s, were the only ones he would buy without reading first. She learnt that Powell was Cecil’s fag at Eton. They both agreed that comedy was out of fashion in novels.
