The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  But there is another man in her life. An Oxford don called Henry Grainger. He is an old flame, whose wife, Eve, has recently died. When Henry married Eve, Beatrice bought herself an expensive black lace dress, her widow’s weeds. But now he is free. There is little need to point out the wish fulfilment in Pym’s story.

  Henry takes Beatrice out to dinner. She forgoes cosmetics because Henry doesn’t like women who wear too much make-up. She thinks back seven years to the ‘uncomfortable rapture’ and unhappiness of their nights together. In those days, the chaperone rules were strict for women and Beatrice broke many of the rules in order to meet Henry. When she recalls the fun of those days, Henry is surprised. He thought their affair had caused her unhappiness. Then he adds, sourly, that women, especially intelligent women, ‘adore suffering’ and are masochists.

  After dinner, they go to the Oxford Union where Gerald/Hughie is giving one of the speeches. He is an impressive political speaker and Beatrice is drawn back to him. But then Henry asks her out for a late night drink at the Randolph and she hesitates. He accuses her of acting immaturely, but she is afraid of opening Pandora’s box:

  ‘My dear girl – it’s very little after half past nine – you’re not a second year student with an essay to write. You’re grown up now – a don and a respectable woman.’

  ‘The two aren’t synonymous,’ said Beatrice.

  ‘No.’ Beatrice could not see his expression in the dark, but his voice sounded surprised and pleased. ‘That means that I might suddenly come across the Beatrice of ten years ago.’

  ‘No it doesn’t,’ said Beatrice firmly. ‘The door of the lumber room is kept locked and all the past is shrouded in dust sheets.’[6]

  Pym was telling herself that even if Elsie Harvey died, she would not return to Henry’s bed. Later, towards the end of the novel, Beatrice indulges in a daydream about the two men she has really loved. Here we see the makings of Pym the mature writer:

  Most women had somebody in their life, she supposed. The skeleton in the cupboard, the owl in the attic. Her own heart or memory or wherever it was that past loves were stored away must be like a kind of lumber room – full of old pictures, with their faces to the wall, broken chairs, stuffed birds and in one corner there might be an object shrouded in a dust sheet, so that one couldn’t see it or think about it any more. Like Henry when he had married Eve. Or Hughie. And then years afterward one might lift a cover of the sheet and discover that one could fling it off quite carelessly, finding underneath it only mild, kindly looks and spectacles – nothing to be afraid of any more. That had already happened with Henry. And one day it would be the same with Hughie. The Lumber room, like death, was a great leveller.[7]

  The novel is unfinished, but Julian Amery would continue to be a model for several literary heroes and, moreover, the embryo plot of a love affair between a young man and older woman would continue to intrigue Pym, culminating in her masterpiece written many years later.

  That autumn, Pym and Hilary moved into 27 Upper Berkeley Street, close to Hyde Park. Barbara had a ‘minute little room at the top of the lodgings house’. She always liked to write at high windows. She wrote to ‘sister’ Elsie: ‘It is such a pleasant life – I don’t think I’ve been so happy since I was a young girl at eighteen in my first year at Oxford.’[8] She reported that she had finished The Lumber Room (omitting all mention of the dead wife sub-plot) and that she was writing a new novel about North Oxford and its inhabitants.[9] She was feeling better than she had felt for a long time: ‘I am very happy and don’t need comforting which is something new! The only thing is to work at something you like and that you feel is worth doing, even if it’s only a novel that doesn’t get published. I suppose it’s all good experience, anyway and while I’m doing it I’m perfectly happy.’[10]

  In this new novel, she eschewed the more experimental approach of her previous attempts and returned to her old style. She told Elsie Harvey that it would be a comic novel in the manner of Some Tame Gazelle. It was a good decision. She would later say that the world that she evoked would seem a million miles away from the cruelty and misery in the real world. Pym was also excited to be in close proximity to Julian in London. She had not forgotten his invitation to walk up to the door at 112 Eaton Square.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  We go to Crampton Hodnet

  Crampton Hodnet is a lie. It does not exist outside the imagination of a deceitful clergyman called Stephen Latimer. He has been caught out walking with a single woman on Shotover Hill, near Oxford, when he should have been at evensong. Not wishing to be discovered in an indelicate position, he pretends that he has been to visit a vicar friend who lives in the imaginary Oxfordshire village of ‘Crampton Hodnet’.

  Latimer is young, good-looking and unmarried, and resents being considered marriage fodder for every available spinster. He is described, unforgettably, as ‘a handsome, complacent marmalade cat’. His lie about his whereabouts seems to grow bigger with the telling. Jessie Morrow, with whom he had been walking, is astonished and appalled in equal measure: ‘Miss Morrow listened to this story in amazement. She wondered if it showed in her face, for she had never before, as far she could remember, heard a clergyman telling what she knew to be deliberate lies. And what a hopeless story! she thought pityingly.’ The problem with his lie is that it has put him in Miss Morrow’s power. He is horrified when she proposes a toast to ‘your friend, the vicar of Crampton Hodnet’.[1] She is not going to let him forget his fabrication. He has been weak and foolish and now has to find a way out of his mess.

  Francis Cleveland, an Oxford don, is having a midlife crisis. His academic research is going nowhere (he has been working on his thesis for twenty-eight years); he is bored by his kind but dull wife and unappreciated by his only child, Anthea. When he is asked to teach a brilliant and good-looking undergraduate, he is ripe for the taking. Barbara Bird, ‘a tall, dark girl with beautiful eyes’, has written a good essay on John Donne, which encourages Mr Cleveland to take an interest in his new student.

  He was completely taken aback. At one moment she had been no more than one of the better-looking young women, who had just read him an extremely good essay and then suddenly he found her beautiful dark eyes looking at him in such a way that he was startled into asking himself how long it was since any woman had looked at him like that. He thought of his colleagues in the Senior Common Room at Randolph: old Dr Fremantle, Lancelot Doge, Arthur Fenning, Arnold Penge … One couldn’t imagine a woman gazing at any of them in such a way.[2]

  Barbara Bird and Francis have tea together in Fuller’s, in the direct gaze of the nosy inhabitants of North Oxford. When he arrives home and his wife asks him about his whereabouts he also tells a deliberate lie.

  ‘I had tea with Killigrew,’ he said defiantly. It was the first time, as far as he could remember, that he had ever told his wife a deliberate lie. It made him feel fine and important, a swelling, ranting Don Juan with a dark double life, instead of a middle-aged Fellow of Randolph College, ignored or treated with contempt by his wife and daughter.[3]

  Of course Francis Cleveland and Barbara have been spotted and become fodder for North Oxford gossip. Miss Doggett, Cleveland’s formidable aunt, holds Sunday afternoon tea parties for undergraduates in her large Victorian house on the Banbury Road. Tittle-tattle and teacups circulate freely in her drawing room, where she reigns supreme. It is not long before the rumours about her nephew and his pretty student reach her and cause her to get involved. What Miss Doggett does not know is that her companion, Miss Morrow, has a secret of her own.

  The novel is peopled with the kind of Oxford types that Pym knew well and characterised with acuity: the flamboyant Eton aesthetes, Michael and Gabriel; the dull, dry master of Randolph College, Dr Fremantle (Balliol is reinvented as Randolph because it lies opposite the hotel); the camp assistant Bodley’s librarian, Edward Killigrew. Pym suggests that North Oxford is its own village. And like the villages of Jane Austen, it is a place that could be desc
ribed as ‘a neighbourhood of voluntary spies’.[4]

  Pym depicts, with a razor-sharp scalpel, the toxic insecurities of Oxford academics, the petty squabbles of the Bodley’s librarians, the bitchiness of the aesthetes and the callousness of the female undergraduates. The worlds of North Oxford and Randolph College are riven with petty jealousy, muck-raking and tale-bearing. Clever people, she notes, are inclined to be fond of spiteful gossip and intrigue.

  The heroine, Jessie Morrow, is described as thin and used-up. She buys a lovely dress, the colour of tender green leaf, which she hides in her wardrobe for fear of damping remarks and disapproving raised eyebrows. It does not do for a lady’s companion, who is regarded as little more than a piece of furniture, to aspire to romance. She wears a shapeless grey cardigan and is ignored by most of the important Oxford worthies, but is nevertheless a woman of ‘definite personality’, who is able to look upon herself and her surroundings with detachment.

  Miss Doggett’s character is perfectly expressed in her opening words: ‘Miss Morrow, Miss Morrow. Where are the buns from Boffin’s!’ She is a busybody with a muckrake: ‘Her chief work in life was interfering in other people’s business and imposing her strong personality upon those who were weaker than herself.’[5] Though she has no connection with the university, other than her nephew’s position as a don, she keeps her finger on the pulse and invites an assembly of odd bods to her teas: ‘Where but in a North Oxford drawing room would one find such a curiously ill-assorted company? thought Miss Morrow. The only people who really seemed at ease were Michael and Gabriel, but then they were old Etonians and Miss Morrow was naive enough to imagine that old Etonians were quite at ease anywhere.’[6]

  Michael and Gabriel (‘two giggling pansies on the sofa’) are two of Pym’s finest comic characters. It is they who inform on Francis Cleveland when they bump into Miss Doggett and Miss Morrow in the University Parks:

  ‘Oh Miss Doggett, what a delight!’

  … ‘Why Michael and Gabriel,’ she said, ‘what are you doing here? You quite startled me, leaping about like that.’

  ‘We feel we must express ourselves in movement,’ said one of them.

  ‘We’ve been playing Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps all day and we’re simply shattered by it.’

  ‘Michael wants to leap into that pond with one glorious leap,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Wouldn’t that frighten the ducks?’ said Miss Morrow prosaically …

  ‘Do you think we ought to tell Miss Doggett?’

  ‘Tell her what?’

  ‘What we saw in the Physick Garden?’

  ‘He means the Botanical Gardens,’ explained Michael. ‘Of course it was the Physick Garden in the seventeenth century, wasn’t it? We always like to use the old names.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Miss Doggett indulgently.

  ‘Well it’s rather naughty,’ Michael giggled.

  ‘But it may be our duty to tell,’ said Gabriel piously. ‘Think how frightful it would be if we failed in our duty.’[7]

  As Pym would report to Jock, there were several excellent comic set pieces of this sort scattered through the novel. Mr Latimer’s proposal has a similar comic pomposity and underlying self-centred pragmatism to that of Mr Collins’s proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. Mr Latimer does not love Miss Morrow, but he believes that ‘he might do worse than marry her … how pleased she would be’. When his proposal comes, it is deliciously absurd:

  ‘Oh, Miss Morrow – Janie,’ he burst out suddenly.

  ‘My name isn’t Janie.’

  ‘Well, it’s something beginning with J,’ he said impatiently. It was annoying to be held up by such a triviality. What did it matter what her name was at this moment?

  ‘It’s Jessie, if you want to know, or Jessica, really,’ she said, without looking up from her knitting.[8]

  It’s a marvellous touch that even as he forgets her name she doesn’t bother looking up from her knitting.

  The set piece of Mr Cleveland’s elopement with Barbara Bird is equally impressive. A weekend in Paris, which seemed so romantic in principle, is thwarted by a missed boat to Calais and a rather sordid hotel in Dover, rather like the one Julian Amery stayed in. Barbara runs away from the hotel and Mr Cleveland is left feeling more relieved than jilted. ‘After all, everything had happened for the best. Things generally did. Margaret always said so and wives were usually right.’[9]

  There are glimpses of Henry and Jock. Francis Cleveland, the handsome Oxford don and failed academic, owes something to Henry Harvey, with his love of the poet Cleveland and academic interest in Gerard Langbaine. His midlife crisis affair with a young undergraduate called Barbara is a sly joke in which Pym pokes fun at her younger self, who ‘had cherished many impossible, romantic passions for people she scarcely knew, or had perhaps seen only once’. Edward Killigrew, assistant librarian, wears a leather jacket and mittens to keep him warm in the freezing Bodleian Library, just as did Jock. The only reference to Friedbert is a green Tyrolean hat.

  Pym was relying less on in-jokes for her friends. She was honing the skills for which she would be celebrated. Her characters work better because they are more fully rounded, not just the caricatures of her first attempts at fiction. Above all, the novel is uproariously funny, as Pym intended: ‘There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that’s all.’[10]

  Pym had been encouraged to hear that Jock had found a publisher for his novel, The Almond Tree. He was to be published by Jonathan Cape, the publisher who had shown initial interest in Some Tame Gazelle, but had ultimately not accepted it. Pym had been upset at the time, jokingly calling Cape ‘falser than false Cressid’ but, inspired by Jock’s news, she wrote to him asking for a meeting.

  Pym asked Mr Cape if she could have a job in publishing, but was told there wasn’t an opening. However, he was encouraging about her work and advised her to keep on writing. Cape invited Barbara and Hilary to a cocktail party at his flat: ‘He is a charming man and so amusing.’ Pym’s agent, Ralph Pinter, advised her, in her writing to: ‘Be more wicked if necessary.’ She found Pinter ‘kind and helpful’, but was not entirely sure about this advice: ‘Can you imagine an old spinster, frowning anxiously over her MS, trying to be more wicked? Or rather, trying to make her people more wicked? It is difficult to imagine is it not?’[11]

  CHAPTER XXXII

  Introducing Mr Simon Beddoes

  Just as Julian Amery was the inspiration for Gerald – the younger man from Balliol with whom the heroine falls in love in Beatrice Wyatt or The Lumber Room – so in Crampton Hodnet we meet Simon Beddoes, with whom Anthea Cleveland is deeply in love. We first meet him kissing her passionately in the family library.

  Like Julian Amery, Beddoes is an Etonian and now at Balliol. He hails from a political, titled family and wants to be in politics like his father. He is short in stature, but huge in personality. When Anthea first meets him, he sweeps her off her feet with his glamour, but, deep down, she knows that his political ambitions take precedence. Like her creator, Anthea would like to be in the enviable state of ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’, but she is in love. She decides that rather than spending her time kissing Simon, lying on the sofa, she will show him that she is ‘intelligent’: ‘We’ll really talk about something. She wasn’t sure what – perhaps the Foreign Policy of His Majesty’s Government, she thought, stepping into a puddle and splashing her stockings.’[1]

  Anthea visits his rooms in Randolph College, pausing for a moment at his staircase and looking at his name painted over the door; ‘knocked, went in and the next thing she knew she was in his arms’. He has turned out all the lights: ‘except for the glow of the fire, for Simon understood the value of a romantic atmosphere’.

  Pym both evokes and mocks the romance of love-making in the room of an Oxford undergraduate on a rainy December evening:

  At this hour time seemed to stand still
… The Salvation Army went on playing half-recognised hymns, the rain fell softly but steadily and from different parts of Oxford came the sound of the various bells calling people to evensong … Lights were turned on to reveal the happy lovers blinking like ruffled owls, the honey toast lying cold and greasy on a plate in the fireplace, the tomato sandwiches curled up at the edges and the Fuller’s walnut cake a crumbly mess because it had been roughly cut by inexperienced hands.[2]

  The pair hold hands, staring into one another’s eyes. When Simon hears one of his friends calling his name from under his window, he takes great care that his friends see him kissing Anthea’s hand: ‘He was the only one of his set who had a young woman in love with him.’[3]

  Beddoes likes being the centre of attention and likes the sound of his own ‘caressing’ voice. Men like him, but women are less sure. Jessie Morrow realises that he will never marry Anthea: ‘He wanted to do things that people would remember, great things and making a woman happy could hardly be called that.’ She sees with a flash of ‘worldly insight’ that Simon wants a fine romantic love affair to ‘fill in the time when they were not busy with more important things, like making speeches or writing clever political pamphlets’.[4]

  Anthea looks out of her bedroom window and blows kisses in the general direction of Balliol/Randolph:

  Simon was not thinking of her. He was lying happily awake in his college bedroom, going over a speech he hoped to make at the Union debate on Thursday. Of course he adored Anthea, but ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart’, especially when he is only twenty and has the ambition to become Prime Minister.[5]