by Paula Byrne
That the referendum was associated with widespread intimidation of voters does not seem to have registered with Pym. Whether or not she made the Nazi salute is not known, although one of the first decisions any traveller had to make when crossing the border in the mid-1930s was whether or not to ‘Heil’ Hitler. By 1934, the Nazi salute was all-pervasive. One Cambridge University student who travelled to Hamburg the same summer as Pym felt that giving the salute was merely a matter of politeness, like raising your hat in church. Others believed it was a public endorsement of a ‘thoroughly unpleasant regime’.[5]
In fact, it became increasingly risky not to raise your arm. A young British woman of only eighteen called Joan Tonge attended a Nazi rally and steadfastly refused to give the salute, standing with her arms by her side ‘like an offensive bit of rhubarb’. Immediately a group of stormtroopers came galloping up, shouting and screaming, until they were told she was an ‘Englander’.[6] All things considered, it seems very likely that Pym would have Heiled Hitler at the Rathaus rally.
Sometime in the autumn of 1934, Pym wrote to Rupert Gleadow and told him about her summer travels to Germany and her admiration for the stormtroopers in their black uniforms. He wrote back, warning her about her fixation with Nazi men: ‘It’s good that you have been to Germany and can talk it. Oh but please don’t admire those filthy Nazis in the beautiful uniforms: you won’t get a chance much longer, becos [sic] 1936 will just about see the end of Hitler.’[7]
CHAPTER VII
In which Miss Pym returns to England and begins writing a Novel
At the end of the summer of 1934, Pym started a new diary. She called it the ‘third volume’ of her memoirs. Sandra still featured, though it would also include the adventures of ‘Pymska’ – a Finnish version of Barbara. During her final term at Oxford, she had begun a novel about Henry, which she later destroyed. But once back in Shropshire from Germany, she was inspired to begin another:
It is about time I emerged from the silence of the past month and wrote up a little more of my life. Sometime in July I began writing a story about Hilary and me as spinsters of fiftyish. Henry, Jock and all of them appeared in it. I sent it to them and they liked it very much. So I am going on with it and some day it may become a book.[1]
Following a summer holiday, Jock was back at Banbury Road, and beginning in earnest what would prove to be a long and fruitful correspondence between the budding authors. Initially he addressed her as Pym, later she would be ‘Cassandra’ or ‘Pymska’. He was still working as an assistant librarian at the Bodleian’s Department of Western Manuscripts, a position he would occupy until 1938. He sent funny poems to ‘Cassandra’, warning her against loving ‘difficult’ Henry. And she sent him pages of the manuscript Barbara and Hilary story.
The original version of the novel that became Some Tame Gazelle is markedly different from the published version. Perhaps the most autobiographical of her novels, it drew extensively on her Oxford circle and the experiences she had whilst an undergraduate. The novel was to be ‘for Henry’, and she confessed that she was able, in fiction, to express her true feelings: ‘I seem able to say what I cannot in the ordinary course of events.’[2] The heroine – originally named Barbara, then Belinda, ‘keeps looking back to her youth’. Pym thus gave herself ‘an excuse for revealing some of my present feelings about Henry’: ‘No change has been wrought in them, as far as I can see. He remains the only person.’[3]
Pym sets the action thirty years in the future, at a time when confirmed spinsters and sisters Barbara/Belinda and Hilary/Harriet Bede live together in a cottage in an English country village. Belinda harbours an unrequited passion for a man three decades after they had first met as students at the University of Oxford. Henry Hoccleve, tall, dark and handsome, has become, in a stroke of cruel inspiration, a pompous archdeacon. He is married to Agatha, who is, naturally, based on Pym’s great Oxford rival, Alison West-Watson. Jock Liddell is imagined as Dr Nicholas Parnell, now head librarian at the Bodley. John Barnicot is John Akenside; Count Roberto Weiss is Count Ricardo Piozzi. Honor Tracy is Hester Carey. Other Oxford friends make cameo appearances, such as Jock’s musical brother, Donald Liddell, and Lady Julia Pakenham as Lady Clara Boulding.
Henry and Jock, who were sent manuscript chapters, were stunned by the quality of the writing and highly amused by the in-jokes. It is all there in delightful, assured prose: Barbara’s hopeless, unrequited love for selfish, self-dramatising Henry; Jock’s quarrelsome, difficult friendship with Henry; Alison’s cold-fish superiority and ambition (it is she who persuades Henry to become an archdeacon); Hilary’s schoolgirl passion for young curates. Henry and Jock had assumed that Pym’s girlish passion for Henry and her sense of subjugation were matters for joking – ‘Poor Pym’ was their constant refrain. But she had turned the tables on them and revealed how she had stored up every detail and made it into art.
There are, nevertheless, personal jokes galore. Belinda, now a middle-aged spinster, is dressed ‘quietly and generally in good tweed’, in sharp contrast to Sandra’s outlandish and sexy clothes, such as her red satin blouse and black skirt. Jock Liddell’s obsession with extensions to the Bodleian Library is satirised, while Henry’s penchant for quoting from poetry is much mocked: he is a bore about Middle English, quoting Chaucer and rattling on about the ‘Beast fable in the Middle Ages’. Belinda (like Pym herself) loathes the Middle English language and literature studies that were a compulsory part of the Oxford English degree, but she humours Henry. She adores Dr Parnell: ‘The two things that bound them together were dear Henry and our Greater English poets.’[4]
Giving her imagination free rein, Pym projected all her worst fears and hopes into a world thirty years in the future. Henry, an only child, has a son who has inherited his father’s good looks but none of his charm. Alison, having schemed to ‘catch’ Henry, has lost her elfin prettiness and has become a shrew, as predicted by her Oxford friends. Barbara and Hilary live together happily in their cottage, knitting and darning socks for the clergy (another joke about Pym’s incessant sock-darning for Jock and Henry).
Jock wrote a generous letter, praising her novel in the highest terms:
Henry and I think you are a very great novelist. I implore you to continue your story – we long to know more about Barbara and Hilary and the Archdeacon’s family and Miss Tracy and Dr Liddell. Henry thinks you are far greater than Miss Austen: I don’t quite agree, though I place you well above the Brontes. We have read your story aloud to each other, to West-Watson, to Mr Barnicot and to Henry’s sister Betty. Henry’s mother … thought it very clever of the little girl Barbara to think of all that.[5]
Thus encouraged, Pym wrote on. It was no mean feat to have the two men, whose intelligence she most admired, comparing her (at the age of twenty-one) with Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. Henry’s observation about her similarity, indeed superiority, to Jane Austen was acute. It would not be the last time she would be compared to Austen.
Jock was soon writing again, begging ‘Dear Pym’ to send more chapters: ‘I return your story reluctantly – it is one of my chief consolations in life. I have read it about four times with very great pleasure … you are maintaining the interest perfectly – and the characters are developing very well. I particularly like Barbara and Alison in the vicarage garden.’[6] He hoped that her plans to do a B.Litt (graduate degree) at Oxford were coming on, joking about being happy to fetch her library books every half hour. He and Henry had gone to the St Giles’s Fair together, but Oxford was ‘cold and dismal’. Jock told Pym that Henry was ‘like the Archdeacon of 30 years on at his worst’. Perhaps, inspired by Pym, Jock began writing an autobiographical novel himself, which would eventually have the title Kind Relations. Filled with a new respect for Pym, he sent her some of the manuscript. He also offered an encouraging message: ‘We miss you so much – my socks are full of holes and West-Watson has no charms for Henry any more.’[7]
CHAPTER VIII
Pym continues her
Novel of ‘Real People’
Henry left for Finland on 19 September 1934. For the trio, it seemed the end of an era. Jock saw him off at the station, went to work at the library and when he arrived home found a telegram informing him of his father’s death. He wrote immediately to Pym. It is telling that she was one of the first people to be told the news. Jock was a deeply private person, but trusted Pym and confided in her his deep dislike of his stepmother (the subject of his second autobiographical novel, Stepsons). He was coming to rely on Pym’s friendship. As Henry left, they would draw closer together. Jock told her that he looked forward to seeing her again at her graduation ceremony: ‘O Pym, I am so lonely and wretched.’ He begged her to continue with her novel: ‘So send more story soon, it is my chief pleasure in life.’[1]
Jock was also missing Henry: ‘He likes Helsingfors [Helsinki] and seems very pleased with himself for being a lektor’ and is ‘wildly pro-Finn’.[2] He told Pym about his father’s funeral and how he felt curiously detached from his step-family, regarding them as copy for his novel. He was extremely close, however, to his clever, musical brother, Donald. Their early grief, miserable childhood and mutual antipathy towards their stepmother had made them even closer. Don was now living with Jock in Oxford, and playing the piano for five hours a day. Jock wrote that they had settled down ‘to a quiet domesticity which is quite restful – a little like your old age with Hilary’. His letter reveals the careful attention he paid to the Some Tame Gazelle manuscript. ‘Hilary and Barbara could stay at my house on Boar’s Hill if my sister were there to be hostess (she is now nearly 17).’[3]
With Jock’s encouragement, Pym continued to work hard on her novel. She missed Henry but admitted that ‘it is not so easy to be jealous of various vague Finns as of some definite people in Oxford’.[4] Henry did not write to her, so she had to make do with a letter from faithful Harry Harker: ‘it would be so convenient if I could love him’. She complained that everyone wrote to her except for the one person from whom she longed to hear. By October, she had snapped, scrawling in her diary that Henry was a swine not to write.
Furthermore, she was bored of her life back in Shropshire. Every day seemed to be exactly the same and she had taken the decision not to get a job, but to concentrate on her novel. Always someone who tried to be honest with her feelings, Pym asked herself whether she really loved Henry or whether what she felt was a ‘kind of sehnsucht’ (yearning or nostalgia). She admitted that part of her longing was ‘leading such an entirely sexless life here’. She told herself that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’.[5] However, Pym confided to her diary, her novel of ‘real people’ was going on well: ‘though not as fast as it ought to’.[6]
Jock continued to send ‘the most amusing and charming letters’. He did not patronise or condescend; he gave sensible advice and, above all, took her writing seriously. He thought that the last chapters were even better than the first. Jock told Pym that he was sending on the new chapters to John Barnicot and Henry. For Pym, it was an essential means of contact, as her novel became a vehicle for all her feelings of love and loss.
Pym knew that she could always make Henry laugh – and so she played her pain for laughs. There was enormous fun to be had in the idea that marriage to Alison/Agatha was a big mistake and that Henry would have been much happier marrying loyal and faithful Barbara/Belinda. One wonders what Henry thought as he read her chapters in Finland. Pym, thanks to her diary and sharp memory, had recorded every detail of their relationship, though she did not go into detail about the physical aspects, apart from a joke about Belinda knowing that Henry took a size 38 in pyjamas.
Henry’s cruelty is acutely observed. He makes fun of Belinda’s appearance, telling her that her eyes are too large for her face; he complains when she turns up uninvited at his door: ‘Oh, You!’ To which she always replies: ‘Yes, Henry dear.’ He expects her to knit his bed socks and clean his kitchen, but complains when she cuts the bread badly into thick, jagged slices. He requests that she listen attentively when he reads Samson Agonistes aloud in his mannered way (Belinda is not naked in bed when this occurs, as was Barbara in real life), but instead of listening properly, she has ‘been thinking how intolerably conceited and sweet he was. He was still both, she reflected.’[7]
Henry had once complained to Barnicot that Pym annoyed him because she always agreed with everything he said. Pym got her own back in her novel:
Dear Henry had once confessed to a friend that he found Belinda boring because she always agreed with him. Belinda had often wondered how it was possible to do anything else but agree with a person whose only topic of conversation were motor cars and the price of travel from Finland to England and who made minute notes on the whole of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in his second long vacation. What could poor Belinda do but agree?[8]
Like Jane Austen’s heroines, the women in Pym’s novels know when to withhold their superior intelligence.
In Some Tame Gazelle, the Archdeacon loves nothing better than the sound of his own voice, bores his parishioners with his overlong, wordy sermons, and is jealous of his curates. Many of Henry’s traits and peccadillos are depicted in this handsome, selfish, petulant, lazy, conceited and not terribly bright man of the cloth: his dislike of olives, his delicate constitution, his habit of lying in bed in the morning, his constant complaints. His Viennese red wool socks that Belinda must forever darn. His black Oxford bags. His blue hat. His habit of leaning his head to one side when he speaks. His melancholy moods. His theatrical sighs …
How the real Henry must have blushed at Pym’s description of him as ‘childishly petulant’, a ‘sulky child’ with an expression of ‘sour melancholy on his thin face’. As she writes with a knowing wink: ‘If I were to write a book about him people would hardly believe such an Archdeacon could exist.’
Belinda’s erotic interests have been fed by her interest in poetry: ‘Unsuitable quotations from Donne kept coming into her head at the wrong moments.’ There are several jokes about the racy material of Catullus and the ‘dear Earl of Rochester’. Just as Jock gifted Pym with an edition of Rochester’s poems, so too does Dr Parnell for Belinda’s twenty-first birthday. Belinda covers up the filthy Poems on Several Occasions when the superintendent of the English Reading Room comes past her desk. And Mr Mold makes lewd jokes: ‘fancy ordering dull things like the Ormulum when the Earl of Rochester’s Poems on Several Occasions was in the library’.[9]
Pym knew how much Jock and Henry would enjoy such jokes. And they did. Jock was particularly impressed by the way she wove in literary quotations: ‘I think you have a genius for quotation which has probably never been equalled. Not only have you put the culture you acquired here to an extremely effective use, you have also permanently increased your readers’ knowledge of English Literature.’[10] As Jock was well aware, Pym’s novel was much more than a light-hearted experiment in making her friends laugh. It was a carefully crafted and plotted attempt to be taken seriously as a writer.
Later Pym would tone down some of Belinda’s quirky traits, but even in this first version, she is clear-eyed about her heroine’s hopeless love for Henry: ‘Belinda had always found it most convenient to go on loving the people and the things she had loved at the age of twenty or thereabouts. It had become a habit with her.’ The heroine’s loyalty to the Archdeacon is as much about her love of her Oxford days, of which he is symbolic. Older and wiser, she sees how difficult her life would have been as his wife and she is content to adore him from afar, to bask in the memory of their gilded youth and to darn his socks: ‘Belinda contemplated the Archdeacon, but with the eye of the practised knitter rather than that of the doting lover.’ Middle-aged Belinda has finally discovered that it is possible for the heart to become ‘the convert of the head’. But there is a poignant sense of loss and waste, a theme that would become Pym’s hallmark: ‘She had bought the wool, so to speak, and so she must complete the work.’[11]
CHAPTER IX
In which Miss Pym re
turns to Oxford to take her BA Degree
Life in Shropshire continued to be dull and monotonous and Pym found it difficult to write her diary because ‘Nothing happens’. She had heard from Jock that Henry seemed to be settling into his new life in Finland. He had fallen in love with a woman who looked like Greta Garbo.
Pym returned to Oxford in November to receive her Bachelor of Arts degree. The ceremony was ‘rather boring’, but she was happy to see her old friends. Henry had sent a letter of congratulations. She drew closer to Jock – ‘I almost fell in love with JRL – really – and simply adore his company.’ She deeply appreciated how seriously he was taking her literary vocation. He sent her detailed criticism: ‘Literary allusions: Some cutting is essential … and each character could have his leit-motifs I daresay.’[1]
Pym decided that she would wait in Oxford for Henry, who was due back for Christmas. She wanted to test her feelings for him and decided that any misery it might cost was probably worth it. When he finally arrived, he greeted her with a derisive laugh and said he was glad to see her. But it was not a happy evening and she ended the night in tears. It appears that she stayed the night with Henry. In the morning things were calmer. ‘The intense misery of the night before had given way to a state of “calm of mind, all passion spent”’ (her quotation of the final line of Milton’s Samson Agonistes makes one wonder whether they had read it naked in bed again). Henry drove her down the Banbury Road and on to the station, but there was no parting kiss (‘und keine kuss’, as her diary has it). Pym told herself to live in the present and to contemplate a life without Henry. She was also mindful that he had brought her many friends. Her thoughts turned to the spring of 1933 and the ‘divine madness’ that afflicted ‘the poor Sandra’. She believed that Henry had something special that nobody else had, but then rebuked herself: ‘What platitudes for a genius to write! Die arme Pymchen’ (The Poor Pym).[2]