The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  ‘I don’t think he uses words about everything.’

  ‘He deserves to be more respected than I am.’

  ‘Well, I think he gets what he deserves.’[4]

  Felix eventually marries, to uphold his ancestral family seat, believing that he can still maintain his homosexual relationship with Jonathan.

  When Jock finally met Compton-Burnett, she confided in him that she had written a more explicitly shocking homosexual scene that she had been advised to omit: ‘One cut out one scene because one didn’t want trouble.’[5] Pym was entranced by the novel, telling Jock that he had to read it, if he hadn’t already; she particularly wanted to know what he thought of the character of Josephine Napier. It was a name she stored up to be used for one of her most memorable characters.

  One of Pym and Jock’s running jokes was that phrase from John Keble’s hymn ‘New Every Morning is the Love’ – ‘the trivial round, the common task, will furnish all we need to ask’. In her ‘Finnish’ novel, Pym explains: ‘to no other life can these words be better applied than to the everyday activities of an English country Parish’.[6] It became a mantra for the two aspiring novelists, who were both fascinated by ephemera and the importance of the trivial. The platitude appears in several of Pym’s novels, so it must have come as something of a sign when she read the quotation in the first chapter of Compton-Burnett’s More Women Than Men. Compton-Burnett was showing the way to an art of writing that concealed cruelty and transgression beneath the calm surface of English provincial life.

  ‘Of course I couldn’t help being influenced by her dialogue,’ Pym wrote later: ‘that precise, formal conversation that seemed so stilted when I first read it.’[7] In Barbara Pym’s archive is Compton-Burnett’s first letter to Jock, which he bequeathed to his friend, who loved ‘relics’. He eventually got the meeting he had asked for. One of the first critics to acknowledge her genius, Jock Liddell was rewarded with a friendship that would last for many years.

  CHAPTER XXII

  Pymska writes a Finnish Novel

  In July, before she left for Germany, Pym wrote a chatty letter to Jock in which they planned a rendezvous with Henry. It was the first one she wrote in the style of ‘ICB’, which delighted Jock, but it also revealed her despair at the idea of losing both Henry and Liddell:

  Anyway, it will be nice seeing you both – quite like the old days you might say.

  ‘No,’ said Barbara, in a low, harsh voice, ‘it is not like the old days. You know it is not. Why do you wish me to believe a lie? Elsie was not with us then and now she is a wife to Henry and a sister to you. She has taken my place with you both. You do not need me now. No, Henry, there is no need to make such insincere protestations – I had my uses last summer, but a year has passed since then.’[1]

  Jock responded in ICB style:

  ‘You must copy out my letter,’ said Jock. ‘Miss Pym wishes it to be returned to her. I do not know what can be her motive.’

  ‘You need not always be speaking of it,’ said Henry in a flat tone. ‘It shall be done some time or other. It hardly matters when it is done.’

  Jock also hinted that Henry and Elsie were becoming more serious. Writing in this jocular fashion was a way of telling Pym that she must prepare herself: ‘“Marriage is a great responsibility,” said Henry. “I do not wish to be thinking of it.”’[2]

  Pym was perhaps preparing herself by writing her ‘Finnish novel’ in which she, Henry and Elsie featured. It was called Gervase and Flora. As in Adam and Cassandra, she was using her novels to convey to Henry those words she found so hard to say in real life.

  Gervase Harringay, the hero, is a lecturer at the University of Helsingfors in Finland. Gervase is pursued by his old love, Flora, who has followed him from England. But Gervase has fallen in love with a beautiful Swedish girl called Ingeborg. She has a ‘thin, delicately modelled face and long straight flaxen hair’. In her ‘hearth-rug’ fur coat, she looked ‘just like Garbo’. As with Elsie, she has a difficult relationship with her mother. Flora is described as ‘a tall big-boned girl with a fresh complexion and large, bright, intelligent grey eyes’. Like her creator, she has light brown hair with golden streaks in it and a broad mouth ‘always laughing or smiling’. Of all her heroines, Flora is the one who is most physically like Pym. She is handsome and comely, rather than pretty; she is ‘energetic and cheerful, a jolly girl’.[3]

  Gervase finds Flora ‘alarming’ and goes ‘hot and cold’ at the idea of marrying her, as his friends wish him to. He feels ‘a net was closing around him’. When he sees her again, Flora is reproachful about the fact that Gervase never answers her letters:

  ‘Oh, Gervase,’ she said, keeping her hand on his, ‘why didn’t you answer any of my letters? You could at least have sent a postcard of the Hauptbahnhof if there is one.’

  ‘Oh yes, indeed, it’s quite celebrated. But you know that I’m a bad letter writer,’ he said lamely. Could one also claim to be a bad postcard writer? He wondered.

  ‘It would have been much nicer coming here if I had thought you wanted to see me,’ persisted Flora.

  ‘But I do want to see you,’ said Gervase, putting his arm around her shoulders. ‘You know I do.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you do.’ Flora did not sound convinced, but then neither had Gervase.[4]

  Flora’s friends are keen to see her settled in marriage, but each suitor that presents himself is perceived as ‘not good enough for their dear Flora’. She is rather bitter about this: ‘Is there anyone who is good enough for me? I feel that there may not be. I feel that I may be condemned to keep myself to myself all my life.’ Another character, Mr Boulding, tells Flora: ‘I thought your generation with all its education rather looked down on men.’[5]

  Pym poured out her hopeless feelings for Henry in her portrayal of Flora, who has been suffering from unrequited love for seven years: ‘She had been in love with Gervase for so long that she could not imagine a life in which he had no part.’ At night, he fills her mind, ‘her night thoughts, generally less noble than Young’s’. She could not resist a joke about Henry’s love for the gloomy eighteenth-century epic poem Night Thoughts. But Flora is also sensible and clear-minded about her conflicted feelings towards Gervase. ‘Nor, on the other hand, could she imagine a life in which he returned her love. That would somehow spoil the picture she had made of herself … Noble, faithful, long-suffering, although not without its funny side, it was like something out of Tchekov.’

  There’s a new sophistication in Pym’s writing in Gervase and Flora. Belinda Bede’s unrequited love for Archdeacon Hoccleve is depicted in a jokey, warm manner in the unpublished version of Some Tame Gazelle, but Flora’s feelings are rendered with more depth and feeling: ‘She wanted to cling to Gervase’s arm – a thing he hated her to do – and say, “Not yet, please, not yet. Let us stay the same for a little longer. Let me stay in the unhappiness I’m used to rather than start a new one which may be even worse.”’[6] Gervase is a colder, more hard-hearted figure than Henry Hoccleve. He tells Ingeborg, unkindly, that Flora was never really in love with him – ‘it was simply an over-developed imagination and the boredom of being a girl in an English country vicarage. She always dramatises herself and sees herself as leading a life of absorbing interest … I know Flora far better than you do. She can just as easily fall in love with somebody else – it’s her nature.’[7]

  Flora, knowing that she is defeated by Gervase’s powerful attraction to the more beautiful Ingeborg, is angry when Gervase tells her that they will always be friends:

  ‘Friends? What’s being friends?’ said Flora, turning her head away.

  Gervase gave a barely perceptible sigh. ‘But have we ever been more than friends?’ He asked. ‘Very good friends, I admit, but not more than that.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Flora desperately. ‘I can’t ever make you understand, I can see that. You’re too afraid of facing any sort of finality, even if it doesn’t touch you. You haven’t the courage to
put me out of your life as I would put you out of mine.’

  ‘But Flora,’ said Gervase in a puzzled, exasperated tone, ‘it isn’t necessary. Why should I face things I don’t have to face? All this putting each other out of our lives,’ he added with an indulgent smile. ‘Darling child, you take things so seriously. We can always be friends. Now kiss me and show me that we can.’[8]

  Here there is a note of maturity in the writing that is absent in Pym’s previous work. The dialogue is fluid and convincing. She is finding her voice. When Flora retires to bed, knowing she has lost Gervase, she is comforted by the thought that her feelings might not be permanent: ‘Perhaps if she put her misery away at the back of her mind and left it there she might one day be able to bring it out into the light and smile at the idea of its ever having the power to hurt her.’

  Pym sent chapters of her work to Jock and Don Liddell, who proclaimed themselves delighted by the results. They both thought the chapters ‘excessively funny’ and Jock admired her for the ‘full lives’ she was giving to her characters. ‘I wonder how Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett would enjoy it?’ he wrote. He saw the debt: ‘From your work and my own I detect another Compton-Burnett source which I had not discovered before – viz the Russian dramatists. But I really wonder whether she did not hit upon her style by accident in the first place. Is it not easy and delightful to write like that? I wish we had thought of it first.’[9]

  In print, Pym was imagining the very worst: marriage between Gervase and Ingeborg. Somehow, she believed that if she could fictionalise her worst fear and make fun of it, then it would be a preparation for it as an eventuality.

  But then reality struck and it was nothing like what she imagined. On 6 December 1937, Jock posted a letter to Hilary Pym. He typed the address, so that her sister would not recognise his distinctive writing and open the letter:

  Will you please break the news to your sister that the marriage has been arranged and will take place in about a week’s time (quietly in the English church at Helsingfors) between Lektor Harvey and Froken Elsie Godenhjelm? I had not the courage to tell her – besides, I thought it would come better from you and in Oswestry. I hope she will resign herself to be a kind stepmother to Elsie’s children.[1][0]

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Paavikki Olafsson and Jay

  It was 3 December 1937. Pym had gone back to Oxford to visit friends. She did not know that Henry and Elsie were in the final stages of planning their wedding. She was not, at this time, looking for love; she was entirely focused on her writing. And then she met a young Balliol man who would become hugely important to her, both as a lover and a muse. More than anyone, he would expunge the memory of Henry.

  Pym was in Oxford with a friend called Denis Pullein-Thompson. Her latest reincarnation was as a Finnish woman called Paavikki Olafsson. Vikki was the name given to one of Gervase’s students in her novel – a sexy girl in her manuscript – and to compete with Henry, Pym was learning Finnish and trying to pass herself off as a student. Amused, Denis played along. They had lunch in Stewart’s, one of her old student haunts, where Pym was introduced to an undergraduate friend of Denis. The young man walked over to their table. Pym was a little hungover from a sherry party the night previous. The man was of singular appearance: ‘He was about my height, slight and dark with a quizzical, rather monkey face. He wore a camel coat and a spotted tie and looked sleek and nice.’ At the top of her diary she wrote and underlined his name, as if somehow she recognised his importance: ‘Julian Amery’ and in German, she wrote, quoting the Romantic poet Heinrich Heine: ‘Neuer Frühling gibt zurück’ (new spring returns). She also noted that he was an Etonian whose tutor was Henry’s brother-in-law.[1]

  Denis introduced Pym as Paavikki Olafsson, and then left to go to a drama rehearsal, leaving Pym and Julian chatting. There was an instant attraction. By then she had dropped the pretence of Paavikki. They talked about her writing.

  Julian invited her back to his rooms in Balliol which looked over St Giles’ and the Randolph. His room was untidy, with papers and letters strewn all over the table. Though he didn’t smoke or drink, he lit her a Camel cigarette and then took her hand to read her future. She was shocked when he suddenly kissed her. ‘It was the first time anyone so much younger than me had done such a thing, for he was only eighteen and I twenty-four.’[2]

  Later Pym mused how desperate she felt for affection and how charming Julian was, ‘with a kind of childish simplicity combined with Continental polish that was most appealing’. He stole her paisley handkerchief as a love token, refusing to give it back. He played German and Hungarian records on the gramophone and, when she left, he walked her to the bus stop in the rain, their fingers interlocked: ‘I was happy.’[3]

  The next morning, Pym took the train back home to Shropshire, her head full of Julian. They conversed in German and he made her promise to say ‘auf Wiedersehen’, not ‘adjö’ and said he wanted to see her again. She read German poetry on the train home: the wheels of the train appeared to be repeating Romantic verses.

  Despite his youth, Julian Amery was already a rising star. He was the son of Conservative politician Leo Amery, whose mother was of Hungarian-Jewish descent. When he was eleven, Julian was taken to the House of Commons where he met Lloyd George. He asked the boy what he wanted to do when he grew up, and Julian said that he wanted to go into the navy. ‘Why the navy? There are much greater storms in politics, you know. If you really want the broadsides, walking the plank and blood on the deck, this is the place.’ Julian recalled that from this moment on, the scales fell from his eyes.[4] He told Pym that he wanted to be prime minister. He was a determined young man, clearly going places.

  Though he was so much younger than Pym, she was mesmerised by Amery’s confidence and striking dark looks. Short and stocky, he was the physical opposite of the tall, angular Henry Harvey. Unlike Henry, he was utterly sure of himself. He was an altogether more glamorous figure than anyone Pym had previously encountered, with skiing holidays to St Moritz in the winter and summers spent in the south of France. He lived in salubrious Eaton Square in Belgravia, where he was brought up in ‘imbibing the atmosphere of politics’, conversing with Churchill and other leading politicians who were friends with his father.

  That year, before coming up to Balliol, Julian had been sent to Vienna to learn German (he was already fluent in French). He had ‘flirted with’ national socialism, attending one of Oswald Mosley’s meetings, but he was repelled by anti-Semitism and thought that the blackshirts and the Roman salute were ‘ridiculous’.[5]

  The day after meeting Pym, Julian sent his ‘liebe Vikki’ a lavender-blue handkerchief for ‘drying her tears’ whilst reading Goethe’s Werther. Pym kept this relic all her life, though little did she know how useful an extra handkerchief would soon be.

  Julian was clearly very keen. He had been to a ball at the Austrian legation and said he wished that Pym had been there too. He was full of questions: ‘When am I going to see you again? When do you come to London?’ He teased her about her personae: ‘Will you be a Shropshire spinster? A Finnish Student? Or just a novelist up to see her publisher?’[6]

  But then, shortly after receiving Julian’s letter, Hilary broke the news to her of Henry’s marriage to Elsie. Heartbroken and close to emotional collapse, Pym scrawled her misery onto the pages of her diary. Unable to find sufficient words of her own, she resorted to a string of quotations:

  My pen’s the spout

  Where the Rain-water of mine eyes runs out

  (Cleveland)

  1937

  On 12 December – a Sunday – Henry Stanley Harvey married Elsie Beatrice Godenhjelm in Helingsfors at the English Church.

  So endete eine grosse Liebe

  Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,

  From death to life thou mightest him yet recover

  (Michael Drayton)

  When killed with grief Amyntas lies

  And you to mind shall call

  The sig
hs that now unpitied rise,

  The tears that vainly fall:

  That welcome hour that ends this smart,

  Will then begin your pain,

  For such a faithful tender heart

  Can never break, can never break in vain (The Earl of Rochester).

  Josephine turned to the woman and hurried her words, as if anxious to get the matter behind. ‘Simply the deepest widow’s mourning that is made.

  And of good quality and no definite date. Shall wear such things for a long time.’

  ‘Well, you must have your own way,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘It is not my way. It is my character and has nothing to do with me. I have no way in the matter. It is settled for me from within, as it were behind my back.’

  (I Compton-Burnett)

  Herz, mein Herz, sei nicht beklommen,

  Und ertrage dein Geschick,

  Neuer Frühling gibt zurück,

  Was der Winter dir genommen.

  Und wie viel ist dir geblieben,

  Und wie schön ist noch die Welt!

  Und, mein Herz, was dir gefällt

  Alles, alles darfst du lieben!

  (Heinrich Heine)

  THE END[7]

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Liebe Vikki

  Jock gave Pym time to absorb the news and then wrote a long letter in the style of Ivy Compton-Burnett. In many respects, he was as emotionally wrought as Pym. Writing in this vein kept things at a safe distance for them both.

  ‘Tell me all,’ said Barbara in a harsh hurrying tone. ‘I can bear it. I hope there is much to tell.’

  ‘It’s known that I like discovering other people’s business,’ said Jock. ‘But there are things that I am not at liberty to divulge. My lips are sealed.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Barbara in an eager tone. ‘You do not mean …’

  ‘No, I do not,’ said Jock in a firm even tone. ‘I mean something very different.’[1]

  Elsie was not pregnant and it was not a ‘shotgun’ wedding. Jock told Pym that he had been authorised to tell her in Oxford, when they had supper together, but he ‘dared not’. He felt some guilt but took comfort in black humour: ‘I expect they will be quite comfortably miserable ever after in the Russian manner.’ He reported that Henry seemed to dread being alone with his bride on their honeymoon and had asked both Jock and Barnicot to join them in the Alps. Jock tried hard to make her laugh: ‘I had imagined terrible scenes at Morda Lodge’: