by Paula Byrne
Pym sent Richard Roberts a copy of The Sweet Dove Died. After all, he had inspired the novel and he was the last great love of her life. He sent a note from Indonesia, acknowledging receipt. When his fuller response came, he ‘wisely didn’t make much comment except to say how much he enjoyed it’. When Quartet in Autumn had been published, he wrote to tell her that he thought it was her masterpiece. He was too guilt-ridden to admit the brilliance of The Sweet Dove Died. Pym was now philosophical about her relationship with Skipper: ‘It was all such a long time ago anyway … Little did I think that anything as profitable as this novel would come out of it.’[1]
Larkin thought that the final version of The Sweet Dove Died constituted ‘another sad book and notable addition to your gallery of male monsters, though James is really too feeble to be called a monster’. He noted Pym’s cleverness in bringing the reader round to Leonora, who begins as an unsympathetic character: ‘the antiques make admirable symbols for a world of delicate and perhaps old-fashioned emotions’.[2] Pym replied that the extremely favourable reception of The Sweet Dove Died was ‘enough balm to soothe and heal all those wounds when only you and a few kind friends thought anything of my work’.[3] It shot to number 3 in the Sunday Times bestsellers list. Critics described it as ‘faultless’, ‘as scrupulous as it is deadly’.[4] Bob Smith rejoiced: ‘People do seem to be getting your message these days. Perhaps this is what will distinguish the 1970s from … the brutal 1960s.’[5]
In July 1978, Pym went down to London to record her Desert Island Discs.[6] She had lunch with the presenter and creator of the programme, Roy Plomley: ‘cold salmon’ at the Lansdowne Club and then on to Broadcasting House for the recording of the programme. She told Plomley that she was very fond of ‘pop songs’, but she hadn’t chosen any for her interview as she knew she could sing them herself on the island. Her choices were romantic: a waltz from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (‘something invigorating … to make me feel happy and cheerful’); Maria Callas singing ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Puccini’s Tosca, which gave her the opportunity to talk about her war experiences in Naples, where she had her first experience of opera; a religious piece by Messiaen; and for lightness some Fledermaus, and a song accompanied by bouzouki to remind her of her times in Greece.
Barbara sketched an outline of her career: how she didn’t write at Oxford because she was too busy enjoying life, but then began her first serious novel at home in Shropshire; her time in the Wrens; her life combining writing with her work at the African Institute. Plomley asked her about the rejection of her seventh novel. ‘They lost me,’ she says of Cape. He also asked about The Sweet Dove Died, which was about to be published: yes, it was ‘a more contemporary subject’ – she was interested in the idea of a relationship between an older woman and a younger man, which she thought no one had written about before. She did not note that the great drama on this theme was one of her operatic choices, Der Rosenkavalier, nor that this was a major theme in at least two of the novels of her admired Elizabeth von Arnim.[7]
Probed about her writing habits, Pym said that she liked to write every morning and thought that 800 words per day was a good result. She told of the notebooks in which she kept quotations, little details of events and everyday occurrences; things remembered from the past, material for ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, as Wordsworth called the writing process. Asked which disc she would select if allowed just one, she chose the Christmas carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, sung by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge: it offered poetry, music and Christian faith all in one.
Her chosen luxury was a case of white wine – ‘German, I think’ (in memory of Friedbert, who naturally remained unmentioned). Her book – apart from ‘the Bible and Shakespeare which are already on the island’ – was Henry James’s complex, emotionally wrought, late novel of marriage and adultery, The Golden Bowl, a further sign of the newly Jamesian reach to which she aspired in The Sweet Dove Died.
Among Pym’s other choices was Philip Larkin reading his beautiful poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’. He wrote to her after the broadcast: ‘I taped it (no doubt illegally) so that I shall always have it. I thought you spoke very sensibly and amusingly and though your music was a little “foreign” for me I very much warmed to “In the Bleak Midwinter” … though I could hardly bear my tedious voice slogging on.’ With his letter, he enclosed a newspaper cutting announcing an engagement between a certain Richard George Larkin and one Elizabeth Ann Pym of Derbyshire. Pym was highly amused and wrote back: ‘Do you think we’ll get an invitation to the wedding?’[8]
More honours came Pym’s way towards the end of the year, when she was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She was invited to a feast at University College in Oxford and one at St John’s (‘You will soon have had more college feasts than I’ve hot dinners,’ Larkin teased) and she turned the experience into a short story for The New Yorker. Titled ‘Across a Crowded Room’, it centred upon a college feast in which an elderly woman sees a man across the other side of the room and then is aware that he does not recognise who she is. The Church Times also invited Pym to write a short story for their Christmas issue. ‘The Christmas Visit’ recycled Mark and Sophia Angier and their cat Faustina, now in a country parish.
It had been a remarkable year and the only blight was Pym’s health. She was not able to enjoy eating or drinking alcohol and yet her weight was ballooning. After Christmas was over, she resolved to speak to her doctor.
CHAPTER VI
In which Miss Pym works on her Last Novel
Towards the end of the Desert Island Discs interview, Roy Plomley asked Pym if she was working on a new novel. She replied that she was about a third of the way through one, but that it would require considerable revision before reaching any kind of final form. It was clearly inspired by the return of Henry Harvey, who was being a good friend. He had taken her away for a winter break in Ross-on-Wye the previous December. They planned another winter break to Derbyshire. Pym joked about Belinda and the Archdeacon spending their old age together. It was certainly a curious twist of fate that she and Henry were drawing closer again, now that they were in their sixties. In August, Pym stayed with Henry in his cottage in Willersley. His ex-wife Elsie was also visiting: ‘Strange situation dating back over forty years.’[1]
They went on a country walk and along a narrow path: ‘Three elderly people walking – not together but in a long line separately, Elsie stopping to pick flowers.’ So much had happened in the years since Hilary had to break the news of Henry’s marriage to her heartbroken sister. Pym had loved other men – Julian Amery, Gordon Glover, Richard Roberts – but Henry had been her first serious love. He had always rejoiced in her success and though he had published a novel, he was happy to be in her literary shadow. In many respects, things had come full circle. Pym a published, acclaimed novelist and her first love back in her life.
Her new novel was called A Few Green Leaves. She finished a draft of it, which she sent to Macmillan, asking them to see it through the press, though her instinct was that it needed more work. The setting was a return to the setting of her first – the English country village. Pym joked: ‘When I wrote Some Tame Gazelle, I didn’t know nearly so much about village life as I do now.’[2] She based her village on Finstock and the local great house on Cornbury, a seventeenth-century royal hunting lodge in west Oxfordshire. One of the customs of Cornbury was that on Palm Sunday the local people were permitted to collect wood from the Wychwood Forest. Pym opens her novel with a similar theme: ‘The villagers still have the right to collect firewood – “faggots”, as the ancient edict has it – but they’re less enthusiastic about that now,’ says the rector.[3]
However, the villagers no longer need firewood. They have central heating or electric fires. The world of the English village has moved on. Another change is the transfer of allegiance of the villagers from vicar to doctor. The surgery is a stark new building next to the village hall, and the parishioners no lon
ger feel the need to talk to the vicar, when they have the ‘advice and consolation’ of the doctor: ‘There was nothing in churchgoing to equal that triumphant moment when you came out of the surgery clutching the ritual scrap of paper.’[4] Even the rector’s sister, Daphne, who keeps house for him, insists that the doctor is the most important person in the village. Matters of the body are more important than matters of the soul.
The novel’s heroine is Emma Howick, who is an anthropologist, staying with her mother in the village. The mother, who teaches English literature, has named her in honour of Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, ‘perhaps with the hope that some of the qualities possessed by the heroine of the novel might be perpetuated’. But the daughter is reminded more of Emma Gifford, Thomas Hardy’s wife, ‘a person with something unsatisfactory about her’.[5]
Emma’s old lover, Graham Pettifer, returns to the village. They had been students together, and when she sees him on television she writes to him, and he asks to visit. Unsure of whether he is still married, she sets the table for three, and is surprised when he turns up alone: ‘She had never before experienced the curious awkwardness of meeting somebody you had once loved and now no longer thought about.’[6] As with Henry Harvey, Graham reveals that he has returned from teaching abroad, is divorced and living alone. He tucks into the hearty meal that Emma has provided, and tries to kiss her when he leaves. Now that the years have passed, Graham seems to be less tall than she remembered: ‘had it always been like that or had he shrunk, diminished in some way?’[7]
Emma decides on a new topic: ‘Some Observations of the Social Patterns of a West Oxfordshire Village’. She takes notes on the vicar, the two doctors, the food inspector and former Church of England clergyman, two young academics (often in the pub), a writer, and a church organist. Most of the original inhabitants can no longer afford to live in the heart of the village and have been forced out to the council estate on the outskirts. Emma notes that she has seen nothing of the gentry, in particular Sir Miles of the big house.
The old people still remember the war: Chamberlain’s speech on the wireless; evacuee children; smoking cigarettes – a pack of ten in blue packets (but the young people now do not smoke). The task of tidying up the village mausoleum and planting pelargoniums in the graveyard has been outsourced to a young florist, Terry Skate, who has long blond hair and pink rubber gloves. The times are changing.
When Graham comes to live in the village, he imagines Emma will help him settle in; she buys Heinz tins and milk. He still expects her to look after his needs and home comforts, and complains about the tinned food, expecting fresh country produce. She now finds him ‘almost comic’: ‘Did I once love this man?’ she asks herself. ‘Time has transfigured them into/Untruth’, as Larkin once wrote.[8]
CHAPTER VII
In which Miss Pym makes her Final Journey
On 8 January 1979, Pym went to consult her doctor about her ‘increasing bulk’. He performed various tests and told her what he thought it might be. ‘Naturally I seized on the most gloomy (if it would be gloomy to die at 66 or 67?)’[1] She was referred to a consultant surgeon in Oxford, who arranged for her to be admitted to the Churchill Hospital.
In hospital (‘purple jelly with a dab of synthetic cream’ and ‘All right, dear?’) Pym was told that there was malignant cancer in her abdomen. It could be treated by radiotherapy or an operation. She accepted the diagnosis bravely, thinking about how cancer affected people in the past: ‘If I’d been born in 1613 I would have died in 1671 (of breast cancer).’ They decided to treat the tumour with radiation: ‘it is a poison and may make me feel sick’, she noted. Her own doctor – ‘Very kind and practical’ – asked Pym where she wanted to end her life, at home or in hospital or a nursing home. She hoped, however, that the radiation would give her some extra months, possibly years. She hoped to finish her final novel: ‘May I be spared to retype and revise it, loading every rift with ore!’ As usual, she drew deep within for courage and fortitude: ‘All humanity is in the Out Patients, those whom we as Christians must love.’[2]
Pym told Bob Smith that she hoped for a few more years of ‘good life’ and she planned another winter break with Henry, to pursue the historic literary associations of the Midlands. She told Philip Larkin that so far she had experienced no ill effects of the drugs and that she was coping well with the news: ‘After all, I have lived eight years since my breast cancer operation in 1971, so I suppose you could say that I have survived.’ She had no desire to live to be very old, she said, and joked about how to tell people about her terminal illness: ‘What, you still here?’ There was good news about her books. Penguin were going to reissue Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings in paperback: ‘This is an enormous pleasure to me.’[3]
Larkin found the news about Pym’s illness ‘most distressing’, though he was delighted about Penguin: ‘you’re really in the big time. All the others will follow … no one can read you without wanting more.’[4] He joked that he would buy the whole lot and send them to Cape on All Fools’ Day. He also promised to visit.
The draining of the fluid in her stomach made Pym feel more comfortable and the hospital appointments gave her ‘amusement and material’ for her work. In America, she was being lauded; John Updike wrote a fulsome review for the New Yorker. Her beloved cat, Minerva, had to be put down, ‘but a new tabby has adopted us and she is pregnant, so new life is springing up’. Snowdrops were appearing, as her favourite season began. At the end of March, Pym went to Derbyshire with Henry. They drank Orvieto wine and visited the lovely village of Bakewell, close to Chatsworth. Then they swung into Nottinghamshire, to try to find Byron’s home, Newstead Abbey, and had lunch in D. H. Lawrence’s Eastwood. On the way home, they stopped for tea at a motorway service station: ‘A whole new civilisation.’[5]
Later that month, Pym was invited to Hatchards’ Authors of the Year party. She was amused to find Less Than Angels next to an autobiography of Diana Dors. As they were about to leave, she was accosted by the best-selling author of country life bonkbusters, Jilly Cooper, who told Pym that she was a great fan of her work. Then there was a Romantic Novelists’ lunch at the Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly.
The cold weather had given way to a warm spring: ‘A fine Easter, sunshine and things burgeoning. I live still!’[6] Four kittens were born in April and the sisters kept a little black one, finding good homes for the others. Pym enjoyed the fact that the birth of the kittens brought a stream of visitors, including children: ‘I thought of a splendid title for a novel, Blind Mouths at the Nipple.’ Larkin came to see her and she was able to show him her favourable American reviews. Pym wrote to thank him for the visit and to tell him that Cape were reprinting Jane and Prudence and No Fond Return of Love: ‘So I wish all neglected novelists could have the good friends and luck that I’ve had.’[7]
In May, she heard the cuckoo for the first time in the year and was glad to have survived until summer: ‘Summer at last (what one has stayed alive for).’[8] She was well enough to continue polishing and redrafting her novel. At a (Catholic) church service in June, she noted the charming Irish vicar: ‘At the service I felt I could enrich my novel by giving more about Tom’s church, which was probably like this one.’ She also began to plan a new novel about two women, starting with their college life: one from a privileged background and one from a more ordinary one. She wanted to bring the war into the novel and perhaps plot a triangular relationship: ‘when she comes to stay with her friend she hopes to “get to know her husband better” – with unexpected results’.[9]
Pym turned sixty-six in June and wondered if she’d make it to the age of seventy. In July, she attended a lunch at her old college, St Hilda’s, ‘and had the usual consolation of not looking as old (or as fat) as some of my contemporaries’.[10]
But by August, she was feeling ill and in a ‘poor physical state. Very blown out and feeling disinclined to eat and rather sick.’ Thoughts of death continued, though she was facing her end with her usual
courage and vim: ‘Perhaps what one feels about dying won’t be the actual moment – one hopes – but what you have to go through beforehand – in my case this uncomfortable swollen body and feeling sick and no interest in food and drink.’ After having some more of the fluid in her abdomen drained, she felt better. She was given new medication to try, but her once healthy appetite had completely gone and she was constantly nauseous: ‘A few nips of brandy, Lucozade, weak tea, toast – hardly enough to sustain me.’ Later, a doctor called and said he could give her some drugs to help combat the nausea: ‘Also he says that champagne is better than Lucozade.’[11] Hazel Holt’s son, Tom, had gone up to Oxford that term, which made Pym pensive: ‘So he is embarking on what should be the happiest days of his life.’[12] Her Oxford days had been the happiest days of her life. She told Larkin that she was enjoying the sunshine and being very well cared for by Hilary; he asked if he could telephone Hilary to enquire about her health, as he didn’t want to exhaust her with conversation.
Hazel Holt was a regular visitor and found her friend ‘cheerful and prosaic about her condition and always with some splendid Pym anecdote or “happening”’.[13] Pym’s hair had thinned with the radiotherapy and she now wore a kerchief knotted around her head. Tom would sometimes visit, bringing news about Oxford student life. She gave him the plot of a love story, which he wrote for her.
One of her final acts was to send Philip Larkin two finished copies of Jane and Prudence and No Fond Return of Love. ‘The whole six of them look quite handsome in their bright jackets,’ she told him, ‘and looking at them perhaps I can quote St Hilda’s motto: Non frusta vixi – though I still wonder if any of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for you and Lord D. and the dear TLS.’ He was, she told him, ‘such a good friend’.[14]
