by Barbara Pym
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
30 December 1966
Dearest Bob,
I’m so glad you liked An Object For a Walk and hope you will write and tell Jock so, as I’m sure he must be a little depressed by the meagre reviews and lack of enthusiasm for it. Naturally I could detect bits of myself in Flora and Hestha (strange spelling). Poor Henry [Harvey], what an inspiration he has been.
Richard gave me a nice lunch before Christmas at the eleventh hour, as it were, and we got on quite well. I don’t imagine we shall see anything of him in 1967, but I might ask you and him to dinner in the summer. All I want now is peace to write my unpublished novels.
Love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
11 January 1967
Dear Philip,
Just a note to thank you for the kind message about my novels on your Christmas card (a very nice one, with foxes) – it did cheer me up. I doubt if I shall ever publish another now though I certainly am at work on something – perhaps the ideal state to be in, never finishing (‘ Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss’ etc). I did revise and improve the one you saw but still haven’t managed to get any publisher to take, and at the moment it is lying on top of a cupboard in my room. Perhaps with the spring I may try it somewhere else.
I am surrounded by work, which is perhaps why I have broken off to write this. An excessive number of books on Africa coming out and the April number of the journal about to go to press … you will know about that cosily full in-tray.
With all good wishes for this year,
Yours ever,
>Barbara
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
16 February 1967
Dearest Bob,
A flat with a lift doesn’t seem quite what I had imagined you living in. It was rather the large decaying old Brazilian-style mansion, though I don’t think you ever said anything to suggest quite that. Bright yellow curtains in the bedroom(s) – how far from the anthropologist in the rest house in the twenties!
I met John Ballard [an anthropologist] once and I think he was rather shocked when I showed him a rather chaotic collection of Intelligence Reports we have at the I.A.I., and when he suggested mildly that it would be nice to have a list of them, I said roughly that there was certainly no hope of that. It might be a nice job to do on those long dusty August afternoons this year, perhaps, waiting for you to come to take me to tea at the Kardomah, but I have been so busy these last months and still am. All the same it has helped me overcome the depression that occasionally threatens when I think of nobody wanting to publish my novels, and my total ‘failure’ (if that’s the word) with Richard. Trying to understand people and leaving them alone and being ‘unselfish’ and all that jazz has only the bleakest of rewards – precisely nothing! Now I am incapable of taking any action at all, which is just as well.
Much love,
Barbara
17 May. Hazel and I recalled Dryden living in Fetter Lane, perhaps writing Absalom and Achitophel in the place where our [I.A.I.] Library now stands.
28 May. Lying in bed with migraine or something like it. The best things – life, health, freedom from misery. Hilary was ill too, so after a light supper we welcomed Sir Francis Chichester back [from his round-the-world voyage] with brandy and dry biscuits.
7 June. A Corot birthday card from Skipper with affectionate message. Then the next day a long tortuous letter from Mollie Lightbourn explaining that it was late because she forgot to post it on the 1st, as Richard instructed her. I wrote a cool friendly p. c. back. A real B. Pym situation. Then today a card to us both from Richard in Elba. Perhaps one could be friendly again – yet I feel like a cat that’s been offered a dish of plain Kit-e-Kat and wonders if it really wants that.
7 July. Oxford with Bob. Pusey House. Lunch at the Randolph. Pitt-Rivers Museum to look at cross-bows (all dusty and locked away). Blackwells. Writing p.c.s in the garden of Rhodes House then St Stephen’s House (locked chapel and overgrown garden) tea in Henley on the way back. Then I let fly about Richard which rather spoiled things then and later in the evening, so that the thought of him has made my ‘nervous indigestion’ pain return. But only temporarily I hope.
‘Top of the Pops’. ‘A Whiter shade of Pale’. Sad Bach-like tune, but to see it is a kind of nightmare, the dark brooding youth playing the organ and the vocal sung by a man in full Chinese dress even to the pigtail. Decadent and horrible.
9 July. In the self-service, a monk doesn’t manage his tray too well so the grey-haired woman table-clearer has to help him.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
9 August 1967
Dearest Bob,
These long lonely August afternoons are ideal for receiving visitors when one is dozing over proofs. The other day in a fit of boredom I nearly telephoned Richard for a bit of conversation but then I was afraid he might feel awkward and that I might not be able to think of anything to say, so I didn’t. So unflattering to feel that a person really doesn’t ever want to see you again – I don’t think it’s ever happened to me before quite like this! Now, alas, I am too old to change myself but shall just be more cautious in future – not allowing myself to get fond of anybody.
Much love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
7 December 1967
Dear Philip,
I hope you will have been having a good term and that your new Library extension has grown a few feet. I remember you mentioned it some time ago. There is something Ibsenish about it, or perhaps the idea of it, though I imagine you won’t have to climb to the top or anything alarming like that. Lots of books to put in it, of course, and endlessly proliferating bibliographies. Our Institute is at this moment organising a biblio. conference in Nairobi – talk about ‘Some Problems of…’!
Did you see in the chat about the Arts Council awards today that Edward Candy is a woman! I was rather disappointed, having pictured this rather nice sensitive amusing man – I think Strokes of Havoc is better than Parents’ Day and agree that the influence of Ivy Compton-Burnett is too strong. Perhaps ‘she’ will grow out of it. In about ten years’ time, perhaps somebody will be kind enough to discover me, living destitute in cat-ridden squalor, and recommend me for one of the grants, if there is still an Arts Council then.
The new book I mentioned [The Sweet Dove Died] really is new and I have finished the first draft. It will need some pruning and sharpening before I dare try it on a publisher, if I ever do. The friend who has read it thinks it almost a sinister and unpleasant book, which may be all to the good. I didn’t try to make it so, but tended to leave out boring cosiness and concentrate on the darker side. (Now you will wonder what on earth it is about – in the main, the relationship of an older woman with a younger man.)
The Faustina novel I did prune and improve quite a lot but have now put aside – I may take it out again but I feel the subject and all those clergy could never be sympathetically considered by any publisher now. By the way Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women are to be modestly reissued by a reprint firm, Chivers of Bath, who do a lot for libraries, where there is apparently still some demand for these two. Next summer is when they should be available.
I haven’t asked at all about your writing because you said you weren’t – but I hope that was temporary?
Yours ever,
Barbara
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
9 February 1968
Dearest Bob,
Are you beginning to experience ‘Some problems of a review editor’? It makes one almost hate people when they don’t send in reviews, I find, and I have my own private black list on which it is very terrible to be.
Hilary’s book [Songs of Greece: a compan
ion for travellers, publ. Sunday Times] is very pretty – you can’t buy it except by ordering it through the Sunday Times – I should think she may send you a copy. So clever of her to have done it – she is waiting anxiously for Jock’s reaction. Francis King is very good, I think – The Last of the Pleasure Gardens very upsetting – Japanese ones fascinate me – The Waves Behind the Boat, excellent except for rather melodramatic ending. Jock says he has another coming, all about a prep school and full of cruelty (I probably told you). I am still going on with something, trying to make it less cosy without actually putting in the kind of thing that would be beyond my range (keep that and quote it in my biography, young man from the University of Texas!).
Why you shouldn’t get a job at an English university when your time in Lagos is up I can’t imagine. Unless, of course, you intend to become a clergyman. You thought perhaps that I might have retained some idealised vision of the clergy and perhaps in a sense I still do, just as I still even now at my age tend to believe what people tell me – it’s just a quality in oneself. But I am under no illusion about church people, on the whole, and the dullness and pettiness and dreariness of all the things a clergyman would have to do. Chaplain to a girls’ school, perhaps? Probably the only kind that have such a thing now would be a fashionable Roman (of course) Catholic boarding school, where the Duke of Norfolk’s daughters went, maybe.
I ripped this letter out of the typewriter because I thought I heard D.F. outside my door, but it was only the carpenter come to do some repairs! Still, the page was nearly finished anyway.
Much love,
Barbara
17 July. Dublin. In Molesworth St why should there be a notice to say ‘Marmalade For Sale’ in the window of the Hibernian Church Missionary Society?
The lone American lady drinking crême de menthe on the rocks to match her emerald ring and the other ladies so old and preserved enjoying exotic cocktails in the bar of the Great Southern Hotel Killarney.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
18 August 1968
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for your letter and the photograph of the new Library which I have studied with interest, noting particularly the opulent looking cars parked on the campus (or do they belong to the builders?). Also interesting is a shadowy figure in the foreground – ? the spirit of the Librarian?
I read about your sit-in. One wonders if all students would feel they had to have one. I of course saw it all in comfort on TV, which made it even more confused, especially when the foreign students used such phrases as (here I must consult my notebook) ‘infiltration of negative elements in social unity’.
I wonder if you have been on holiday yet – I’ve had a pleasant few days in Ireland in May, with good weather – Dublin, Galway and Sligo – Yeats’ grave and Lissadell – terribly sad decaying house where Constance Markiewicz was brought up and the Gore-Booths show one round. I urge everyone to go there because I feel they need the money, and it has a melancholy charm (and nowhere to have tea).
If you would really like to read my novel, of course I should be very pleased. My lending copy awaits you and I’ll send it on receipt of a postcard or other intimation. I’m afraid it isn’t going to get published easily, if at all. I sent it to Longmans, having an introduction to John Guest there who also read An Unsuitable Attachment, but last week he returned it … ‘fiction market increasingly difficult’ etc. etc. Doesn’t think anybody would buy it – only more elegantly expressed than that. Perhaps it isn’t really sinister and unpleasant at all, and it does lack a central character with whom one can ‘identify’. Maybe I have lost the knack of writing altogether – it’s so hard to judge, and loyal friends have enjoyed it. I shall of course try a few more publishers – not Faber, I think, not wishing to embarrass poor Charles Monteith who was so kind (or you!).
I’ve written more about it than I meant to and left little space for an intelligent discussion on the Predicament of the Novelist in 1968. I haven’t read Melinda or the new James Baldwin or the new Edna O’Brien but probably shall when I can get them from the library, out of curiosity and jealousy.
Yours,
Barbara
20 August. Philip Larkin sent me a photograph of his new Library extension. Was ever a stranger photo sent by a man to a woman (in a novel she might be disappointed).
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
9 September 1968
Dear Philip,
I am sending The Sweet Dove Died (a thriller about the American Presidential Election?) for you to read and hope it may give you some amusement. Criticisms welcome, of course (one says bravely) or perhaps the whole thing is hopeless for this day and age. (At least it isn’t in dialect). Chatto have it at the moment (3 weeks ago). I shall go on trying if they send it back.
Did any poem come to you in Sutherland? On the moors, or the rocky coast, or in the hotel lounge? I should like to think one did come.
Yours ever,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
20 October 1968
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for returning the MS of the S.D.D. and for your most interesting and helpful criticisms. Nobody has ever told me what was really wrong with the book and I felt there must be something. It suffered through starting off as one thing and ending up as another, the penalty of having so little free time and energy that continuity is lost and one’s ideas change in the meantime. I started not at all in sympathy with Leonora, who began by being a minor character, but as the book progressed I got more interested in her and really enjoyed writing about her best in the end. I should really have scrapped Rose etc except as minor characters and concentrated on Leonora, James, Humphrey, and Ned (who came in as an afterthought). I wonder if I could do anything with it on the lines you suggest. I feel uncertain at the moment and have rather lost confidence in myself. It would be different if I had more time. As it is, I only write at weekends or on holiday. Yes, I do ‘go in’ every day and as one gets older one gets more tired, so that evenings are spent lazily watching the Telly rather than writing. What a mixed blessing that great invention is!
I really owe you two letters for I never thanked you for the brief, bitter, amusing one about your holiday and the horror of the single rooms. On Thy Belly would be a fine title for an autobiography. I could write Dust Shalt Thou Eat, which might be no more than a guide to restaurants in the luncheon-voucher belt of E.C. 4.
How good of you to speak to William Plomer like that! I saw him reading the lesson at Wren Howard’s Memorial Service in September but I hurried away afterwards and didn’t speak to anyone. I felt it was really in memory of the house of Cape as it used to be. All the same, if my two unpublished books really do have serious flaws in them perhaps the outlook is not so unpromising for me after all. I could do better in my old age, if I haven’t given up by then.
I hope your students will be reasonably well behaved this year, though that is a lot to hope for. I think John Lennon so repellent-looking now – like a very plain middle-aged Victorian female novelist, with that long hair. I used to like the Beatles once and I still like their songs if I don’t have to look at them.
Yes, I have two cats so their ways are known to me – one tortoiseshell and one black and white. We always had them at home, but couldn’t in London till we got a house with a garden
I do hope you will get something better to read than unpublished, unpublishable novels! Let me thank you again for telling me (like D.H.L.) what my novel was really about, and apologise for this boring letter, but I felt I wanted to write soon.
With all good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
7 February 1969
Dear Philip,
Your poem in The Sunday Times was powerful and haunting, the falling of those leaden words – I cut it out and put it in The Whitsun Weddings, though of course I hope I sh
all live to see another volume in which it will be printed.
I wish now I had thought of becoming a poet – and now I can see that I have let myself in for implying that a poem is less work than a novel. Please don’t take it amiss! Anyway, if it comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree … or whatever Keats said.
I am struggling to improve that Leonora novel but make slow progress. Anyway I like having something to think about and occasionally write a bit of. I have seen, or rather received, two copies of my Library Association reprint of Excellent Women. It looks rather nice, though I can’t bring myself to read it. I get comfort from a rereading of Anthony Powell and Charlotte Brontë (not Jane Eyre).
Very best wishes,
Barbara
15 May. At the Royal Society of Literature to hear a talk by Elizabeth Bowen on the novelist and his characters. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing that one, as it were, brought away was the idea of L.P. Hartley as a young man reviewing Elizabeth Bowen’s first book for the Spectator, living in Camden Road. How different now in Rutland Gate! Perhaps I could have got up and protested, made a scene, have had to be ‘removed’ to everyone’s embarrassment when Elizabeth Bowen seemed to praise Emily Brontë at the expense of Charlotte. ‘Who was that woman who made a scene?’ someone would ask. And nobody would know – only that I had been introduced by Philip Larkin, and that might have brought shame on him.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
27 May 1969
Dear Philip,
I did go to the Roy. Soc. Lit. (how do Librarians abbreviate it, when they have to?) and was most interested to set foot in there and hear Elizabeth Bowen give a very good and interesting talk, and see L.P. Hartley very much occupying the chair against a background of dusty dark blue velvet curtains. And who were all those ladies in beautiful hats, not all Fellows, I’m sure, though many of them looked as if they ought to have been. I was put in the second row (having arrived only just before it was due to start) so had little opportunity to look around me, but I found I was sitting just in front of Elizabeth Taylor, whom I know, who had come with her husband. Eliz. Bowen said that people never recognise themselves in novels (even if they have been ‘put in’) but I think one sometimes makes up a character and then he or she appears in the flesh, like a man now working in our Library, who is so like ‘Mervyn’ in my unpublished one, and even speaks of ‘Mother’.
