by Barbara Pym
To Richard Roberts
40 Brooksville Avenue
My dearest Skipper (yes, that name does seem most suitable for you in the Bahamas)
I’m so glad your going home has been worthwhile for you, and you will be rewarded for going, as one so often is. Your 86 year old aunt sounds marvellous and how nice that you were able to take her on that trip. My father (also just 86) won’t even come to London!
I should think that it must be a relief to have somebody less complicated than ‘Gary Reindeer’ to be with, though of course we are drawn to the tortured and tortuous ones, you and I.
Do have some more photographs taken and let me choose the most characteristic even if not the most glamorous.
It says on this Airmail pad that 12 sheets and an envelope weighs less than half an ounce, but I doubt if I can go on at that length. Also, I am writing this in the office in the morning, which seems frightfully sinful.
I have practically finished the revision of that novel though I suppose I shall never be really satisfied with it. Now I must read it again with a cold critical eye. I really much more want to get on with the other one I started which will be more amusing. I hate writing ‘tender love scenes’ and am no good at it – why I wonder? Too inhibited and ‘behaviour’-ridden no doubt.
I hope you are well – blessings and prayers and everything
Barbara
31 January. Who but R. would be welcome in the middle of a Sunday afternoon (c. 3 p.m.). Are you still brown she asks idly. He pulled out his shirt and revealed a square of golden brown skin on his belly. She (Leonora) found herself thinking ‘All thy quaint Honour turn to dust/And into Ashes all my lust’. Except that he probably hasn’t any quaint honour. She reproaches him for not having been to Mass, ‘Then you didn’t pray for me’, since that is the only time he prays.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
16 February 1965
Dear Philip,
I have a great curiosity to know what you could have been doing at the Inst. of Social Anthropology in Oxford. Some conference, I suppose. It certainly wouldn’t matter if you put a hot jug down on a polished? table there, from my recollection of it. Yes, Professor Evans-Pritchard is perhaps the greatest of his generation and is of course known as ‘E-P’. He has little to do with our Institute these days and spends his time writing articles and books and studying Zande texts. They (the Azande) ‘relish putrescent meat’ or did in the good old days. E-P is an R.C. convert – rather unusual in an anthropologist – perhaps that explains the reproduction of old masters – if they were of a holy type?
I agree this is a depressing time of year, but November is really my least favourite month – or perhaps December, because that has Christmas too! Only yesterday though I noticed that it is getting brighter in the evenings and this morning there was almost a feeling of spring in the air. (Perhaps only women notice these things?)
Our Library problem, I mean the peculiar young man, seems to have been solved. At least, he was given the sack after Christmas, being told, I believe, that there was to be some ‘staff reorganisation’. Is that always how it’s done? Then a woman of uncertain age suddenly seemed to be sixty and she had to retire, and for a time it seemed as if nobody would come. But now there is a young girl … here I stopped writing yesterday, I suppose because I was seeing the procession of young girls over the years and perhaps got thinking that it’s only the older, duller and more reliable members of the staff who go on and on. Today, being surrounded by galley proofs, I feel a bit like your poem about the Toad ‘work’.
I have revised An Unsuitable Attachment – not very well, I believe and it will need some further polishing before it can be sent to any other publisher. I am also going on with another. I like the stage of having work to do on a book, before one actually has to take positive action, like writing to anyone. Revising and polishing could go on for ever.… I really still wonder if my books will ever be acceptable again when I read the reviews in the Sundays. I think it might be nice to be famous and sought after when one is rather old and ga-ga – not in one’s forties and fifties, or perhaps fame when you’re very young is good, if the years after aren’t too much of a let-down.
Yours ever,
Barbara
20 February. A sad day. Rang R. in the evening and he felt ‘guilty’ which I hate. He came to tea on Sunday in his very spoilt little Bahamian mood, full of euphoria, money and sex talk, teasing me and being unkind to Minerva. I get irritated with him.
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
40 Brooksville Avenue
1 March 1965
Dearest Bob,
I am still writing and there is plenty going on inside even though I’m not very optimistic and they may have to be privately printed by that man in Ilfracombe after all. I have revised An Unsuitable Attachment, though not very satisfactorily – but I think I can put it right with the help of Hazel’s criticisms, then I am in the middle of another book. I haven’t thought any more about working part time here, mainly because I doubt my capacity to earn money by writing, at the moment. If only I had a small private income or a husband – how badly I’ve arranged my life! I really think we do need novels like mine now – did you like Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness? I lent it to Richard, as he hadn’t read any of hers, but I don’t think it was really quite his kind of book. As you will no doubt have heard he came back from Nassau almost the day he was expected and looked very well and brown. His life there is full of such rich material for fiction, but I suppose it is really beyond my range. Richard’s mother is supposed to be going to Athens and the islands in April – with three American ladies, so that they can play bridge!
Love,
Barbara
24 May. Fortunately all the fury and bitterness I sometimes feel has stayed hidden inside me and R. doesn’t – perhaps never will – know! 25 May. All miserable again and determined to ‘end it all’ between us – but how? And why?
29 May. A letter from R. inviting us to dinner on my birthday. I phoned him and we talked. I must learn not to take ‘things’ so much to heart and try to understand – don’t stop loving (can’t), just be there if and when needed.
10 June. Leonora gets the young man to read the menu for her and the programme, rather than put on her glasses.
16 June. Lunch in the Kardomah with R. The salmon sandwiches and coffee and talking ‘business’ about bidding for a book for him – then a walk in the rain to Smiths to buy books for him to read on holiday. What a change to be happy for a moment – it may as well be recorded after all these weeks.
22 June. Wonderful peace with R. away (Istanbul now, then Greece and Venice!). They are altering the Kardomah and ‘improving’ the ground floor and soon it seems the basement will be gone. Where now will we be able to read and write and brood? First the mosaic peacocks went, now this! What emotions are trapped in that basement.
25 June. Went to Christie’s to view 3 books of natural history shell and bird prints that R. wants me to bid for. Very cosy in the basement looking at them – a chaos of books, a man correcting the proofs of a catalogue. A nice girl and an Italian gentleman come in to enquire about books he bought over a year ago and now apparently nowhere to be found.
1 July. Went to Christie’s to bid and got Sharpe’s 2 vols of Birds of Paradise for £1,000! It was rather nerve-wracking but rewarding and afterwards lunch at Fortnums.
19 July. R. to dinner – very successful. He brought me a little glass bird from Venice.
Rainer Maria Rilke 1873–1936
Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis 1855–1934
(18 years difference between them, but he was a man of genius)
To Bob Smith
40 Brooksville Avenue
22 July (4th after Trinity)
Dearest Bob,
Just after I had left you after that rather pleasant unexpected tea and Danish pastry in the Kardomah on Thursday afternoon, I ran into Professor Fo
rde, just as I was rounding the corner into Fetter Lane. ‘Ah, there you are, Barbara,’ he said. ‘I went into your room but seeing you weren’t there – thought you must be in the Ladies.’ (So you see there is no need to tell people when you go out of the office.)
Love,
Barbara
17 August. My novel [An Unsuitable Attachment] is with Faber, but surely for not much longer. It may be better to find another interest – antiquarian books perhaps?
19 August. Last night it came back but with a nice letter from Charles Monteith. Now I feel as if I shall never write again, though perhaps I will eventually. Rather a relief to feel that I don’t have to flog myself to finish the present one since probably nothing I write could be acceptable now.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
21 August 1965
Dear Philip,
Just a line to say that Faber won’t take An Unsuitable Attachment – rather as I had feared, so I don’t feel too cast down. I can quite see that it wouldn’t be an economic proposition, and not the kind of book to impress a new publisher anyway. Charles Monteith wrote such a nice letter – thank you so much for introducing me to him and for all you have done on my behalf. I don’t know yet whether I shall try the book anywhere else – at the moment I don’t feel at all hopeful and have even thought how restful it would be never to write another word! But I expect I shall go on. The ideal is perhaps to be ‘at work’ on a book but never to finish it. After all, I suppose I am lucky to have got six books published.
How are you? Perhaps on holiday at this moment. (Surely nobody is in Hull in August?) I can’t feel you can have got much wear out of your panama hat this year. I am in the country this weekend, staying near Oxford, but haven’t had a holiday yet, only odd days – on one of which I went to Christie’s and bought on behalf of a friend two vols, of bird prints for £1,000! That was an experience, the bidding and the dealers, and might well come into a future unpublished novel.
I’ve been horribly busy at the office – everything late, proofs not coming, dreadful volumes of seminar papers to get ready for press. But my room is to be redecorated soon and I am to have a new carpet – speckled black and white that won’t show cigarette ash. Perhaps I shall then take on a new lease of life, editorially speaking.
It has just occurred to me – perhaps you are ‘Visiting Professor’ somewhere, though I hope not Los Angeles.
With all good wishes,
Barbara
24 August. Lunching at the FANY Club with R! He seems quite at home among them and his eyes shine when one pays him a compliment. Afterwards choose curtain material in Peter Jones. Then to sit in L’Atelier [his antique shop] for a moment or two while people pass and look at us in the window.
15 September. I find myself going to see Elgar’s grave (directed by an arrow) in the R.C. church at Little Malvern. The weather is dull but not unpleasant – rather calming and saddening and I’m glad I have brought Hardy’s poems with me. Tea in the Abbey tearooms – very good home-made cakes only 6d. each. In the Priory Gardens the smell of heliotrope reminds me of Skipper’s L’Heure Bleue (but one would have to change the sexes for a story wouldn’t one?).
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
30 September 1965
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for your sympathetic letter! I hope by now you will be back refreshed after Sark, ready to tackle any problems that SCOLMA may present during the coming autumn. I can imagine an Ibsen-ish situation developing now that your building plans are halted – all that latent power and energy – let it go into poetry!
This is only a note to ask if you would be so very kind as to let me know (on a postcard will do) the publishers Charles Monteith thought might be more sympathetic towards my novel. Not that I really think it’s much good, but the BBC are doing No Fond Return as the Woman’s Hour serial beginning 6 October and I thought it might be a propitious time to give the book one more try, perhaps. This was quite a surprise to me – and a pleasant one – I shall have to take the transistor to work!
I made some notes in Malvern and Worcester and Hereford on various points, and of course I am now beginning to feel that perhaps I can’t stop writing after all. Even if no one will publish me.
All good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
26 September. After the dentist went to the Wimpole Buttery. A delicious creamy cake tasting of walnuts. Now Skipperless one begins to understand ‘compensatory eating’. Better surely now to write the kind of novel that tells of one day in the life of such a woman.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
29 November 1965
Dearest Bob,
Not much news though what does one expect? I sent the script (as O. U.P. say) of my novel to Raleigh Trevelyan at Michael Joseph. ‘A pleasant book, but hardly strong enough’! almost exactly what Cape said of Some Tame Gazelle in 1936! Anyway for the moment I am not writing but resting and gathering material since every day gives one something. Miss Pym is still frequenting the sale rooms – a week or so ago R. pushed me into the end of a sale at Sotheby’s and made me bid for a book on the Bahamas for him, which I got. Really though I am more at home in Hodgson’s in Chancery Lane where Hazel and I spend happy lunch hours and prices are more realistic.
Love,
Barbara
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
40 Brooksville Avenue
25 March 1966
Dearest Bob,
Today the window of the Protestant Truth Society is in mourning – a picture of the Archbp. of Canterbury and the Pope against a black drapery and a placard saying ‘Archbishop betrays British Protestants’ or words to that effect. (I wonder, who arranged the window display and at what time of day or night?)
Did I not mention my own writing when I last wrote to you? The position at the moment is that I have sent the rejected novel (which I rewrote, as I may have told you) to a recommended agent (Hughes Massie) but have heard nothing for two months! (You may well say that is a very short time compared with what people sending articles to Africa have to wait!) But I hear vaguely from the person who recommended the agent that it is thought to be good but unpublishable at the present time. I haven’t heard officially yet, but it seems that is what it will be. Hazel suggests I should get my works printed by private subscription from those who would be willing to support me and I believe there are a few! Curiously enough I find I can still write and have started, or rather got quite well into, another book which looks as if it might be finished some time fairly soon. Whether it will prove any more acceptable though, is another matter.
Love,
Barbara
30 May. Whit Monday. Sitting in the sun reading Beverley Nichols’ ‘defence’ of Syrie Maugham. Made me laugh – people lying ill in the Dorchester and dying in Claridges. It might be a joke, a pastiche of the 20s written by Sandy Wilson. My own story judiciously edited from these notebooks would be subtler and more amusing.
June. Greece. 610 783 (Henry’s telephone number; he is in Athens). It seemed strange after more than 30 years to be driving with him again. Heard cuckoo in Delphi. Sensational ride to Lamia through the mountains – pass of Thermopylae. As we get down into the straight road to Lamia after the slow grinding climbs and descents, the driver (who looks like a younger, benevolent Stalin) sounds his horn in triumphant paeans and the radio is blaring full blast. Lamia. Plastic doves are being sold in the square and on the back corner of the Hotel Achillia there is a stork’s or pelican’s nest with young. The conductor on the bus sniffs a red carnation, two elderly men sit at a table with a gardenia between them.
My dream about R. We are driving along somewhere in his car when I see he is obviously too drunk to drive so I say ‘You shouldn’t have let him get like this.’ Then I pick R. up in my arms and he turns into a cat.
8 July. A disappointment for the Father at Fa
rm Street? The voice of a lady telephoning to ask the time of the evening meal ‘on behalf of Father Stefanizyn who is with me’ [at the I. A.I.].
30 July. When I was out there arrived 12 beautiful deep pink roses from Constance Spry with a tender note. The roses were tight buds and have gradually unfolded till they are now enormous and flat, almost like peonies. Now he [Richard] has gone to Spain.
31 August. After a wet depressing day yesterday I have decided on a period of silence (by me at any rate) with a possible approach in September (to get Jumble).
15 September. After the Beardsley Exhibition at the V&A, walking along that endless tunnel to South Kensington station, I thought, why this is ‘behaviour’ – and I had said, perhaps even written: ‘where does "behaviour" begin and end?’
23–25 September. Malvern [staying with Muriel Maby]. At the Writers’ Circle Dinner. Margaret Drabble in a beautiful short flowered dress with long sleeves. Some in long glittering brocades. All with neat little ‘evening bags’ – only B.P. with her black leather day handbag.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
Brooksville Avenue
12 December 1966
Dearest Bob,
Anthony Powell’s newest was a great comfort to me when I read it recently – a beautiful book! Poor Richard was very fond of Iris Murdoch’s Unicorn which you couldn’t finish. As for news of Richard, I fear it is all over now (it makes me sad to write this) – he did get in touch once but I think it was only because he and Maurice wanted to get rid of some jumble (which we were of course delighted to have, but still …?). Life has its farcical moments and perhaps my sense of humour is greater than his. Perhaps my sardonic tongue has sent him away or he has just lost interest, the latter probably. How well I know that feeling of ‘embarrassment’ you speak of – racking one’s brains for something to say!
