by Paula Byrne
Pym made it to Christmas, but in January was moved to Sobell House Hospice in Oxford as she did not want to be a burden to Hilary, who had nursed her with such love and devotion. In her wheelchair, scoping out Sobell House, she observed a wealth of rich ‘material’ for a future novel she knew she would never write. One of her last visitors was her old love, Henry Harvey. She joked about having to wear a wig. He found her wit and her courage undiminished. By now, she was very weak and fading fast. Selfish old Henry had proved himself, after all, to be a devoted and loving friend. In Some Tame Gazelle, Belinda/Barbara had imagined the Archdeacon being one of her last visitors. She had been granted the wish made when she was a young woman of twenty-one.
She had also achieved her greatest wish of becoming a highly regarded author. Pym left the world with a canon of works that continue to enthral and entertain. She had faced life and its challenges with the utmost spirit and good humour, and now she confronted death with steadfast courage and dignity. She died after breakfast on the morning of 11 January 1980.
EPILOGUE
In which Mr Larkin attends the Funeral of his Much-Loved Correspondent Miss Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym’s funeral was well attended. It took place in the Finstock parish church, where T. S. Eliot had been baptised in 1927. One of the attendees was Philip Larkin. He noted that there were family, friends and a representative of Macmillan, her publisher. Larkin sat in a pew directly underneath the plaque commemorating Eliot’s baptism. He told Anthony Thwaite (his poet friend and later the editor of his letters) that he regretted Pym’s death very much: ‘Even at her funeral I found myself looking forward to getting a letter from her describing it all.’[1]
Prudence Glover, who had seen much of Barbara during the years in Pimlico and Barnes, and who had once lived with the sisters when she went to college in London, was devastated by the loss: ‘Although I was married with children by then, I couldn’t and wouldn’t believe she was old enough to die. I remember her with deep affection and know she always loved me.’[2]
In a talk describing her life as a writer, Barbara Pym once said that ‘the greatest source of material for character drawing is probably the author’s own self. Even when a novel isn’t obviously autobiographical one can learn a great deal about a novelist from his works, for he can hardly avoid putting something of himself into his creations.’[3] She was the most autobiographical of writers, and, although she never married or had her own children, she knew love, and she wrote about it, in all its manifestations.
Persuasion was Pym’s favourite Jane Austen novel, and she could not bring herself to believe that the author of such a beautiful and satisfying depiction of love could not have experienced it herself: ‘I don’t suppose anybody nowadays would be likely to think of Jane Austen as a quiet spinster who had never known love but only imagined it.’[4]
In a memorandum written after her death, Jock Liddell wrote movingly about his relationship with Barbara Pym. He described himself as greatly fortunate that the young Pym found herself sitting in the Bodleian Library opposite Henry Harvey. Because of that moment, Pym and Liddell would become the greatest of friends. Liddell recalled that Barbara was the first to write to him following the death of his beloved brother; also that in 1945, when he left Oxford for good, it was she who helped him to disband his flat. In 1976, she visited Jock in Greece for the last time. He remembered her as entirely carefree. Liddell admired Pym’s courage for continuing to write following the rejection from Cape. She was a ‘good, brave, religious woman … with equal courage she fought cancer when it came’: ‘Her work was particularly satisfying to her emotionally, one felt she had no other needs. And she had the very great good fortune of having a devoted sister with whom to share her life, and to be her first and best reading public. She realised all the more what it had been to me to lose mine.’[5]
The sibling relationship, so important to Jock and Donald Liddell (and to his literary heroine Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra) was, as Jock knew, sacred and profound. Hilary’s loss was great (she would live for another twenty-five years). The life Pym had envisaged for herself and her sister, at the age of twenty-one, living in a country cottage in perfect amity, with jokes and laughter and companionship, had come true. Only Jock could fully feel the depth of Hilary’s pain on losing such a sister. Never one to cast praise carelessly or to exaggerate the beneficence of human nature, which he often found wanting, Liddell wrote of his lifelong friend: ‘I think I have never known anyone else who was so good all through.’[6]
The Larkin poem that Pym loved best was not typical of his usual bleakness and dry wit. It is not about bedsits or ‘the toad work’ or ambulances or old people in nursing homes. It is a love poem, uplifting and sonorous, about time and timelessness, fidelity and truth. This was the one that Pym chose for Desert Island Discs: her friend the author himself reading ‘An Arundel Tomb’. The poem tells of a stone effigy of an earl and his countess, lying together in their tomb, their hands clasped together, ‘faithfulness in effigy’. It ends with a simple and beautiful sentiment: ‘What will survive of us is Love.’[7] Barbara Pym was a passionate, deeply loving woman, who loved and was loved. And what survives of her is her readers’ love of her novels.
Afterword
Barbara Pym lived through extraordinary times. She went up to Oxford in the 1930s in a traditional world still populated largely by male undergraduates, where women were subject to strict rules of conduct. She spent time in Nazi Germany, befriending a man who was close to Hitler. During the war, she worked on the home front, then as a censor and finally served in the Wrens. In the fifties, she lived and worked as a single, independent woman in London’s bedsit land. In the sixties, she witnessed the sexual revolution. Throughout all of this social and political upheaval, she kept a detailed record. Her novels reflect these changes.
And yet, as with Jane Austen, also a ‘spinster’ writer who lived in a cottage with her sister, Pym’s life has been largely assumed to be quiet and uneventful. As we have seen, the first essay review of her novels was written by her friend, Bob Smith. Its title ‘A pleasure to know Miss Pym’, originated the myth of her as a respectable but constrained ‘excellent woman’ writer who created a comforting world of English villages, academic communities and suburban parishes. For many readers, ‘Miss Pym’ offers a cross between P. G. Wodehouse and Anthony Trollope’s Barchester. As in their novels, her characters are instantly recognisable: we feel we know a Sister Blatt, a Mildred Lathbury, a Father Thames, a Piers Longbridge.
Hers is a peculiarly British humour. Barbara Pym was an extremely funny woman. She possessed a talent for comic delivery of a single word which friends, and their children, found irresistibly funny. A friend’s son remembered vividly the amusing way she said words such as ‘scones’. This ‘Lady Bracknell’ delivery (‘a handbag’) is given to Leonora Eyre: ‘A bucket? … Really, did one look the sort of person who would have a bucket?’[1]
The humour in her novels is sometimes redolent of British seaside postcard comedy: an overweight spinster suddenly appears in her Celanese vest and knickers whilst the curate is on his way to supper, his own ‘woollen combinations’ showing through his cassock. That same spinster leaves out old copies of the Church Times to use as toilet paper for dressmaker Miss Prior. English gentlewomen abroad are at risk from Italians with ‘wandering hands’: ‘Pinch your bottom they would before you could say knife.’ ‘Men only want one thing,’ says Miss Doggett, but she has forgotten what it is. Her typical subjects are decayed gentlewomen who wear ‘good tweeds’, always have their knitting needles to hand, and insist on the ceremonial aspects of afternoon tea.
Then there are the lazy clergymen who rely on the splendid women of their parish to do their laundry and invite them to supper. Vicarage gardens are transformed into fairgrounds with coconut shies, bran tubs, jumble sales and vegetable competitions. Excellent women are the kind who hang their dish cloths on a nail by the side of the cooker. The men wear bowler hats and c
arry briefcases. Soggy afternoons in North Oxford are rendered bearable by undergraduate tea parties, presided over by dowagers. Somewhere in an inner city office, a secretary is bursting into tears after being scolded by her boss for a typing error. An errant caterpillar appears unwanted in a badly washed salad. A curate is nipping into the Crownwheel and Pinion for a sneaky morning drink.
Pym was a lover of small things, and her world abounds with them: paper spills in a fancy case, an embroidered Radio Times cover, a beaded milk jug cover, an antique box, small soap animals. ‘Unimportant trifles’. But they bring ‘unexpected moments of joy’. Bunches of mimosa in a wheelbarrow, English pears, chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies; daffodil buds that look like hard-boiled eggs. Mrs Cleveland of Crampton Hodnet misses her estranged husband; when she remembers him coming into the house with a bowl of gooseberries, his affair with a student is temporarily forgotten.
In all this, Barbara Pym’s world is the epitome of George Orwell’s England of ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning’.[2] It is an England that in many respects does not exist anymore; perhaps it never did, except in literature and the realm of the imagination. The ‘small unpleasantnesses’ that make life unhappy do seem to belong to a more gentle age. For this reason, Pym’s literary reputation has suffered: it is generally assumed that her novels are entirely whimsical, nostalgic, ‘safe’. Yet she always avoided the dangers of flippancy and whimsy. And many aspects of her characters’ lives remain all too familiar: it is still the case that the burden of housework falls predominantly on women, and that marriage for women too often begins in romance and ends at the kitchen sink. For many reasons, one senses that she would have understood the #MeToo movement.
Unlike the world of P. G. Wodehouse, Pym’s is not a static society. Her themes of loneliness, secret lives and unrequited love are evergreen, but the world of her novels changes perceptibly through the decades of her writing life. The fabric of her society is delicately knitted together and the slightest ruction has consequences. But there are darker undertones, too, and they must be confronted in order to do full justice to her life and work.
I came to Barbara Pym in middle age, finding her on the shelves of a marvellous, now defunct, independent bookshop in Oxford, run by a brilliant and grumpy man who was a Pym fan. Indeed, he might have walked straight out of one of her novels. I was drawn to the covers of the posthumous paperback reprints published by the women’s press, Virago. In bold, primary colours, they portrayed women dressed in 1950s clothes, holding a teacup or a kitten or a glass of wine. I read the first paragraph of Excellent Women and laughed out loud in the shop. I was immediately drawn to the extraordinary voice: so Jane Austen-like, but entirely its own. I read one, and then another, devouring each novel greedily.
Because I lived in Oxford, I decided to explore the Barbara Pym archive at the Bodleian Library. I discovered that she kept a diary from her schoolgirl years until her death. She also wrote down thoughts and feelings and ideas for novels in a series of notebooks. She kept almost every scrap of paper: letters, notebooks, newspaper cuttings, household lists, postcards. Sometimes ideas for novels are scribbled on tiny pads of the sort that are given to passengers on aeroplanes, or on the back of menus or page proofs. Writing was a compulsion. Even when she was ‘off-loaded’ by Cape, she continued to craft more novels.
Then I read the first biography of her, by her friend Hazel Holt, with its apologetic title A Lot to Ask. I discovered that the story it tells of Pym’s life was heavily edited and omitted many of the most important events and details that shaped her novels. It is natural that her friend, who worked closely with her sister, was keen to protect her legacy and her reputation, but much of the richness of her experience and the brilliance of the writing is lost. I turned to the ‘autobiography’ stitched together from letters and diary extracts under the title A Very Private Eye: it proved to be an invaluable resource, reflecting a more sensitive, romantic side to Pym, but it, too, was heavily edited and expurgated. So I decided to write a new biography, reflecting the full range of the archive. Pym, unlike her great friend Robert Liddell, wanted her life to be told, and her archive to be held at one of the greatest libraries in the world: the Bodleian. In her journals, she makes interventions to the ‘Gentle Reader of the Bodleian’ who might be writing her life. That she cut out pages of her journals and destroyed sensitive materials also suggest that she desired literary posterity, but was also afraid of some of the darker aspects of her history being revealed.
Some of the evidence that I have uncovered might shock and upset her devoted followers. In mining her archive, I had no wish to ‘dig dirt’; the information sheds new light on Pym, both the woman and the writer. Like many young people who lived through the 1930s, she flirted with Nazism. Pym was something of an obsessive personality, especially as a young woman. She learnt to speak German, read a good deal of German poetry and literature, and fell in love with the beautiful countryside. She, like many others, witnessed a humiliated country get back on its feet, and, without the benefit of hindsight, did not perceive (or chose not to see) the true nature of the Third Reich. Nor was she aware at the time how high the stakes would become: as we have seen, the brother of her beloved Julian Amery was hanged for high treason because of his support for Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, and buried in Wandsworth Prison. Later, of course, Pym recanted and was deeply ashamed of her past, editing the Nazi references out of her work. She must have destroyed her letters from Friedbert, but diary entries reveal the extent of their relationship. The story of her affair with Germany remains as a valuable warning from history.
Pym’s personal life was always complicated. Most of her love affairs were unsatisfactory or unrequited, but she used her experiences and built them into her novels. Her sexual encounters, from the incident that we might now call her date-rape by Rupert Gleadow, to her affairs with married men, to the pleasure she took in the company of gay men, shaped key aspects of her life and her work. Few women novelists among her contemporaries were so open and unjudgmental about homosexuality in the days when it was still illegal. In two of her mature novels, she shows vulnerable women falling in love with homosexual men, and is highly sensitive to the agonies suffered on both sides. James Boyce, who is bisexual, is seen hovering outside a door hearing himself being discussed by a homophobic neighbour: ‘But, darling, one would hardly wish to be a mother to someone like that.’[3] By directing her irony against such prejudice, Pym revealed her own pride in her friendships with gay men.
We have also seen that, after the war, when she worked for a distinguished anthropologist, completing her novels in her spare time, she drew comparisons between anthropology and her own life as a novelist. Both professions are concerned with society and human behaviour. Since her death, the discipline of anthropology, especially as practised in Britain during her time, has come under much criticism for either fetishising or patronising ‘primitive’ tribes encountered during the age of empire. By the same account, some of her jokes about African relics and slide shows of indigenous people belong to a world view that is now obsolete. And yet her underlying point is that she sees little difference between the rituals of these tribal lives and those of English society. Her white middle-class ‘savages’ are ruthless and predatory. A debutante dance in Belgravia is perceived as a hunting ground: ‘what could be more primitive than the rigid ceremonial of launching a debutante on the marriage market?’ In Pym’s ‘civilised’ world, the woman gives her man food and shelter; the man gives what he considers to be the ‘priceless gift of himself’.
Pym is one of the great writers of the human heart. Her novels came from her own heart: we have seen how highly autobiographical they are. As she grew older and wiser, so too did her novels. Over and over again, she made use of scraps of her experience. Friends, family and colleagues knew that they might find themselves woven into her stories; most of them took it well. Nor did she shy away from unflinching self-portraits, which reve
al the extent of her discernment and self-knowledge. Characters she based on herself are rarely flattering, but nor are they self-pitying. Her romantic entanglements often brought her great suffering; she was a sensitive and emotional woman, and, as she grew older, she learnt to conceal her sadness behind a facade that sometimes made her appear aloof. She could be sharp-tongued, as she freely admitted. Yet, those who remembered meeting her as young children recalled her kindness and funniness. She never talked down to children, but treated them as adults.
Pym was a courageous writer and a brave woman. Women are at the heart of her stories. They are not all ‘excellent women’, but they are flesh and blood. She portrays young women struggling with heartbreak in their private lives and narrow opportunities outside the home. She is the great novelist of the plight of single women in middle age, in the era when the war had killed many potential husbands and the discharge of men from the armed forces had closed many of the employment opportunities that the war had brought. And she writes with great tenderness about the old. Her most acclaimed novel, Quartet in Autumn, was pioneering in depicting the lives of four lonely city people on the brink of retirement.
All lives are remarkable, even those that seem to be trivial or commonplace. One of Pym’s favourite quotations, much used in her work, derives from John Keble’s beautiful hymn, ‘New Every Morning is the Love’: ‘The trivial round, the common task, will furnish all we need to ask.’ I have quoted copiously from Pym’s diaries and letters because their observations of seemingly trivial things – food, clothes, listening to the wireless – are so full of wit, warmth and precision that all her manuscripts become little works of art, even as they provide a fascinating social history of the transformation of middle-class women’s lives across the twentieth century.
Pym is that true writer whose fiction makes the ordinary extraordinary. Her reputation is secure, but only among a minority of readers. There is a thriving Pym Society, which alternates its meetings between Pym’s beloved Oxford, England, and Boston, Massachusetts. North American scholars have written academic studies devoted to her work.[4] Her novels are all back in print. But she remains a cult author rather than a widely recognised name. I have sought to introduce a wider audience to her life, world and work. She deserves to be recognised as the Jane Austen of the mid-twentieth century.
