by Paula Byrne
There were exchanges of news and book recommendations. The truth of the matter was that Jock and Pym had far more in common than Henry and Pym. Jock had become fascinated by the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett and thought she was a better novelist than Henry James. Pym vowed to give her another go and in time would become just as devoted to her novels as Jock. He, meanwhile, confirmed that Henry had developed a new respect for Pym since reading her book, but knowing that she was still hurt by him he did his best to present his friend in the worst possible light, hoping that it would alleviate some of Pym’s suffering. He wrote witty, sometimes malicious letters that would have made Barbara laugh out loud: Henry being chased by an angry bull; boring on about Wordsworth and the Lake District; roasting mutton ‘in the Finnish way’, which involved pouring hot coffee over the meat (‘it makes no appreciable difference’, he noted drily). Jock composed and sent hilarious epic poems addressed to ‘Cassandra’, urging her to forget Lorenzo. ‘In Oswestry, as once on the Ilian plain,/ Apollo woo’d Cassandra … The gaunt Archdeacon stalks into our view.’[3] They both carried on the pretence that one day Henry would come round and marry her. He joked about their future children, Cassandra Barbara Crampton Harvey and Lorenzo Gabriel. Jock and Pym began what would be a long-cherished habit of referring to Harvey as ‘poor Henry’ and ridiculing his oft-used phrase ‘remarkably fine’. It was affectionate teasing, though Jock’s attitude towards Henry would harden over the years. He told Pym that Henry would ‘surely wear out more than one wife’.[4]
Pym wrote to Henry, telling him that her novel had been rejected and that she needed to shorten it, though she would always keep the full original version in its two volumes: ‘If you can’t have Pymska in Oxford, you can at least have her novel, which you will like much better as it doesn’t have to be kissed, or taken out to dinner, or to Basingstoke.’[5] She told Henry that she was now at a stage in her life where she was looking for a suitable husband. She also told him that she was making a serious attempt to become an author.
At Oxford that winter, Pym met a man called Brian Mitchell who was very keen on her and, according to her sister, proposed marriage. She rejected Brian, as she had rejected Harry Harker. She could see the advantages of a single life and so far only Friedbert had come close to expunging Henry’s memory.
Jock returned her novel with his latest edit. She had decided to follow his advice and ‘cut out the Nazis’, adding ‘lately I’ve been thinking the story would be better without them and I don’t think I was ever very keen on them’. She thanked him and told him that her father was buying her a much-needed portable typewriter. She was deeply grateful to Jock: ‘If the book is published your name should appear with mine as joint authors I think.’ Jock replied that she was ‘wise to remove the Nazis’. He had also suggested that she cut the passage about ‘Belinda and Henry’s trip to Basingstoke, Pusey street etc’. Pym confessed that she had written this because she was upset with Henry: ‘All this part was written in a wave of anger against Henry, because he told Mr B that I was boring and always agreed with everything he said. It is to be omitted.’[6]
In late January, Pym and her mother were involved in a serious car accident. Irena was driving when two motorcycles came roaring round the corner. There was a head-on collision, hurling the bikers into a hedge. Barbara and Irena were only bruised, but when they extricated themselves from the car, which was a write-off, they saw two young men covered in blood and lying unconscious on the road, their motorcycles beside them. An ambulance was called and a crowd gathered round, though there had been no witnesses to the accident. The motorcyclists both had fractured skulls – helmets were not usually worn in those days; one died as soon as he reached hospital, the other was in a critical condition.
There was to be an inquest, though it seemed clear that it was the fault of the motorcyclists. Pym appeared to be remarkably calm about it all – almost indifferent to the gravity of the situation:
If it hadn’t been so tragic it would have been very amusing making statements to the police and hearing them read out in that marvellous stilted language, but as it is I keep seeing those poor boys lying there with the blood pouring from their heads – although that picture is becoming mercifully less and less real.[7]
It is possible that she was in shock. She repeatedly said to Jock that her mother was not to blame for the accident and there was nothing that they could have done to prevent it. She later told him that straight after writing to him she had been violently sick.[8] Though he could be malicious, Jock was a very sensitive man and sent his deepest sympathies to Irena: ‘I am very glad that you are so strong-minded about it, I am afraid I should be haunted very badly about such a thing.’[9]
Barbara told Jock that the young man’s funeral had taken place and that the Pyms phoned the infirmary twice each day for news of the other critically ill biker. He was only nineteen and after two operations it seemed likely that he might pull through. Eventually he recovered, though with a large scar on his forehead.
Pym repeated to Jock (somewhat unconvincingly) that she was no longer in love with Henry. She was hurt that he had failed to write to her. Even Friedbert had ‘spared a moment from the organisation of the Olympic Games to send me a beautiful postcard’.[10] It was the first time that the Olympics had been televised and radio broadcasts reached over forty stations. In order to outdo the Los Angeles Games of 1932, Hitler had built a new 100,000-seat track and field stadium. But his attempts to use the games to prove Aryan supremacy were foiled by African-American Jesse Owens, who won no fewer than four gold medals.
Pym was told that she was not permitted to leave Shropshire until after the inquest. Part of her was relieved. She told Jock that she knew she was a great comfort to her parents and, with her new portable typewriter, she was throwing herself into her work. Jock admired her fortitude and wrote that he too must emulate her strength and mind and ‘occupy myself with the trivial round, the common task’.[11]
CHAPTER XVI
In which Jock and Pymska draw closer together …
Jock and Pym continued their correspondence, advising one another on literary agents and editing one another’s work. Pym sent detailed notes on Jock’s novel, Kind Relations. She advised him to change the beginning, so that it was from the point of view of the small children. She also suggested chapters that might be cut and tightened.
For the time being, despite a job offer from Cairo, Jock decided to stay put in Oxford. He agonised over the decision and longed for Henry’s counsel. When a letter finally arrived from him, Jock described it as ‘wretched, like a blow from a blunt instrument’. Henry was never very good with other people’s problems, preferring to focus on his own. ‘Is not Henry an unhappy creature when his letters are so full of misery that it needs a prolonged convalescence after each of them?’ wrote Jock.[1]
Liddell was grateful to Pym for her own consoling letter and was beginning to look forward to staying in Oxford, even in the ‘Arctic cold’ of the library: ‘I dare say I should only sit in front of blank pages in Cairo and squash mosquitoes on them.’ He regaled her with hilarious library gossip, including an account of an American looking for Shakespeare. And when she talked of being busy with spring cleaning, he told her a story of his prep school days that had her hooting with laughter:
Never shall I forget a short drama enacted by the domestics of my preparatory school on 17 June 1922 called ‘Mrs Mulligatawny’s Spring Cleaning’. The cook began, regularly letting her voice rise and fall on alternate words: ‘Now girls, do hurry up, or we shall never get the spring cleaning done before Aunt Maria comes.’ And someone sang a moving song about charring.[2]
Another of Pym and Jock’s favourite jokes was to pretend that one day their manuscripts and papers would be read and studied in the Bodleian Library. In response to his playful suggestion that their correspondence would be of immense value to the Department of Western Manuscripts, she replied: ‘All my love letters – no young woman should be without 50 of these.
Could I deposit them in Bodley and order them when I felt inclined to reread them?’[3]
Jock always remembered to ask about the injured young motorcyclists in his letters. Pym told him that the inquest was imminent. She was wondering what to wear: ‘I daresay it will be my old blue costume and a beret. In films, fox furs are the correct wear, but then they cost – decent ones – anything up to half my yearly allowance.’ She had revisited the scene of the accident, as part of the pre-inquest: ‘I am glad to say that I felt no other emotion than curiosity. And I don’t really think I’m hard hearted – just lucky I suppose.’[4]
CHAPTER XVII
The Inquest
On the day of the inquest, Pym was shaking with nervousness. The hearing lasted two hours, with the opposing lawyer doing his utmost to make Irena and Pym appear to be culpable for the accident. The young man who had survived, Grainger, was too badly injured to make it to court. It was all far more distressing than Pym had anticipated, she confided to Jock.
Liddell had recently finished his autobiographical novel, Kind Relations. It was the first of a remarkable trilogy, which would be completed with an Oxford novel about the brothers and Mrs Trew, The Last Enchantments. It is among the best books about Oxford ever written. Pym found Kind Relations brilliant and moving, especially because it corresponded with so much of what Jock had told her about his early life: the death of his beloved mother, his absent father, the way he and his brother were passed like parcels between relatives. ‘I am curious to know how many of them are true and how many are made up. Perhaps they are all true because they seem so very natural.’ She urged Jock to begin his second novel, Stepsons. She wanted to know more about the dreadful stepmother, Elsa: ‘You give quite enough of her to make her a horrible prospect.’[1] She also said that she was thinking of writing her own Oxford novel.
Pym told Jock that she wasn’t in love with anyone, though ‘this state of affairs can easily be rectified by Friedbert’. There was more fantasy talk of marriage to Henry. They just couldn’t help themselves from bringing Henry into the conversation. The truth was that they were both still more than a little obsessed by him and, though driven mad by his arrogance, were drawn to his physical beauty. ‘I am so glad that you are resigned to marriage with dear Henry, he is your fate you know,’ wrote Jock. ‘I don’t doubt that you will be a most useful wife to him – though he himself is fond of painting furniture, so you need no accomplishments of that kind.’[2] Pym, knowing that this was a delicious but increasingly painful fantasy, played along:
Money is the chief objection and lack of affection on Henry’s part the second. I want a platinum wedding ring, also one set with diamonds and perhaps a sapphire engagement ring, too … perhaps it is a pity that the wedding cannot take place but I am fortified by the information contained in my horoscope which Rupert Gleadow did for me some years ago. He prophesied that I should make a profitable marriage – otherwise my husband’s description coincided with Henry’s.[3]
Jock and Barnicot’s banter about a future marriage between Pym and Henry had been meant kindly, but it had raised false hope: ‘Please give my love to my future husband and tell him that if he can find a rich Finn to marry first, so much the better,’ she wrote.[4] Pym still clung to the hope that Henry had thought differently about her ever since reading her novel and seeing that she was a talented writer. She wanted him to come and stay with her so that her mother could ‘knock some sense into him’: ‘I often ask myself (as a kind of test) whether I would rather be loved by Henry or have my novel accepted; at the present moment I feel I would like both, but perhaps if my work were published the rest would follow.’[5]
Jock, having had an emotionally stunted childhood blighted by his stepmother, had a tainted view of marriage. In the manuscript version of Some Tame Gazelle, Belinda and Parnell often discuss the state of love and marriage and Parnell’s views are Jock’s: ‘After all the emotions of the heart are very transitory or at least so I believe. I should think it makes one happier to be well fed than well loved.’ Jock begged Pym to return to Oxford, but although ‘literally pining to come to Oxford again’, she seemed to be coming round to his view that, ‘perhaps a pleasant, uneventful existence is happiness after all’. She told him that she planned to return to Germany in the summer, adding: ‘I’m assuming there won’t be any war or anything like that.’[6]
But then, in May, Henry wrote Pym a hurtful letter, telling her that they had ‘never been real to each other’. She penned a long response, which was a testament to her candour and self-knowledge. She told him that she was tired of writing ‘gay flippant letters to you and expecting you to see that I didn’t really feel that way’. She was ‘fed up’ with their sporadic meetings, his promises to write, his excuses, his inability to ‘improve’ as he got older, ‘of having my peace disturbed for no reason’. Henry tried to put some of the blame on Jock and his inability to take their relationship seriously, but Pym was having none of his lame excuses: ‘it is really because you haven’t been sufficiently interested in me to make much effort about it’. She was drawn to triangular relationships – as we have seen from her relationship with Rupert and Miles – but she was not prepared to betray Liddell: ‘however much Jock may be responsible for the state of affairs between us, I can never forget that he saved me a great deal of unhappiness by his way of looking at things, which I adopted too, at least in our correspondence and conversation’.[7]
Pym tried desperately to explain the two sides to her personality – ‘Sandra’ and Barbara, the ‘real’ side and ‘the flat one’ – but she ended up confusing herself: ‘I’m finding it rather difficult to explain myself clearly, but I hope you’ll see what I mean?’ In the end, she fell back on what she felt was her winning shot as far as her relationship with Henry was concerned: ‘Did I tell you I started a new novel? I am just beginning to get into form, although at first I found it something of an effort.’[8]
What she didn’t tell Henry was that, once again, it was a novel based on her relationship with him.
CHAPTER XVIII
Miss Pym begins her Second Novel in the Summer of 1936 and returns to Oxford to be Henry’s Amanuensis
One of Pym’s favourite authors was Elizabeth von Arnim (Mary Annette Beauchamp), who wrote under the pen name ‘Elizabeth’ and had achieved a huge success with her autobiographical first novel, Elizabeth and her German Garden. Depicting a cruel and domineering husband (whom she calls ‘The Man of Wrath’) and struggling to fit into high-class German society, the central character takes refuge in her garden and in her writing. After the breakdown of her first marriage (her husband was sent to prison for fraud), the author Elizabeth embarked on a three-year-long affair with H. G. Wells. Her 1921 novel, Vera, drew on her disastrous second marriage to Earl Russell (brother to Bertrand) and was described as ‘Wuthering Heights by Jane Austen’.[1]
Pym was reading ‘crowds of novels’, she told Jock, ‘often a little jealously, as I think mine is so much finer and more delightful than so many of them’.[2] Her discipline was to write at least one page a day. She again encouraged Jock to begin his second novel, telling him that it might help him to look back on that part of his life without it being painful for him.
Jock’s dislike of his German stepmother was given full rein in Stepsons. Elsa’s jealousy of her stepsons, her sour resentment, her prioritising of the needs of her own dull daughter, Joan, her stupidity and lack of humour, spill from every page. Liddell was on his way to becoming a fine writer and Pym was indispensable in giving him support and encouragement. She typed manuscripts for him on her new Remington portable and explained that she was altering his style and editing as she typed.
In May, Macmillan rejected Some Tame Gazelle and Pym turned to Jock for advice. Undaunted, she planned on sending it out to Methuen or Dent. She told Jock that Adam and Cassandra was not as literary as Some Tame Gazelle, but hoped that it would find a readership. ‘Cassandra is a perfect wife,’ she said. ‘Adam is sweet but rather a fool.’[3]
As usual, Henry was not far from their minds. Jock continued his tease about Pym and Henry’s nuptials. He had promised her a fish slice and a saucepan, but the joke was beginning to wear thin: ‘I am a nice girl and have some new clothes, but what’s the good of all that without money?’ She told Jock, with her usual honesty, that she knew she was no catch, ‘a poor frog without a log on which to hop’. She’d heard from a friend that Henry was looking ‘ravishingly beautiful’, but added, tartly, ‘it is to be hoped that his disposition and behaviour will suit his appearance’.[4]
At the heart of Pym’s novels are a troop of ‘excellent women’ who are the bulwarks of their menfolk, propping them up mentally, cooking sustaining food and typing up their papers as unpaid secretaries. It was a theme she knew well.
In June, Pym returned to Oxford. She had agreed to become Henry’s secretary. He was back from Finland, writing up a thesis on Gerard Langbaine, the seventeenth-century English dramatic biographer and critic. He was particularly interested in an ‘amorous novel’ that Langbaine had translated from French called The Gallant Hermaphrodite. Pym, with her portable typewriter and newly acquired typing skills, took dictation from Henry. It was a time she would never forget; she felt like they were living as man and wife. She was in Henry’s company night and day, making tea, typing, checking references. In exchange, she was paid ‘thirty shillings a week and a few caresses’.[5] The Oxford B. Litt. dissertation survives in the Bodleian Library; it formed the principal source for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Langbaine.[6]