The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Miss Prior is too grand to sit with housemaid Emily in the kitchen, but not grand enough to eat luncheon with the sisters, so she is presented with food on a tray in the morning room. Belinda feels sympathetically that Miss Prior’s whole life is ‘just a putting up with second best all the time’, and yet she is easily offended: ‘She was so touchy, so conscious of her position, so quick to detect the slightest suspicion of patronage. One had to be very careful with Miss Prior.’ She is described as ‘a little dried-up woman of uncertain age, with a brisk, bird-like manner and brown, darting eyes’. Quick to notice and criticise, she asks for the window to be opened and for a duster to polish the room: ‘I think we all work better in bright, clean surroundings, don’t you?’ And when plump, handsome Harriet asks for her new dress to be cut out of the brown velvet she has bought, bird-like Miss Prior regards her critically: ‘I wonder if it’s going to be big enough on the hips? That’s where you usually need it, isn’t it?’[3]

  The battles between Pym’s women may be small, but they are significant. The scene builds beautifully. Miss Prior disapproves of the two dead vases of chrysanthemums, their stems ‘black and slimy in the yellow water’. Then, much to her consternation, there is no toilet paper in the downstairs lavatory – she is given a copy of the Church Times to use for her ablutions.

  The final horror comes when Belinda discovers that Miss Prior has not touched her cauliflower cheese, though she has devoured the damson flan:

  ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid you haven’t enjoyed your lunch, Miss Prior,’ said Belinda, who now felt near to tears. ‘Don’t you like cauliflower cheese?’

  ‘Oh yes, Miss Bede, I do sometimes,’ said Miss Prior in an off-hand tone, not looking up from her work.

  Belinda went on standing in the doorway watching Miss Prior negotiating an awkward bit of chair cover. Then she looked again at the tray, wondering what she could say next. Then in a flash, she realised what it was. It was almost a relief to know, to see it there, the long greyish caterpillar. Dead now, of course, but unmistakable. It needed a modern poet to put this into words. Eliot, perhaps.[4]

  Belinda knows that if the same thing had happened to her, she would have pretended that she hadn’t seen the unwelcome visitor and would have carried on eating, but Miss Prior is using the incident to humiliate.

  The moment is unexpectedly saved, however, when Miss Prior switches her criticism to Agatha Hoccleve:

  ‘Between ourselves, Miss Bede, Mrs Hoccleve doesn’t keep a good table. At least I never see any proof of it. An old dried-up scrap of cheese, or a bit of cottage pie, no sweet, sometimes. I’ve heard the maids say so, too, you know how these things get about … You always have such nice meals, Miss Bede and you give me just the same as you have yourselves, I know that. After all, it might just as easily have been you or Miss Harriet that got the unwelcome visitor today,’ she concluded with a little giggle.[5]

  Small things matter to Pym (the trivial round, the common task), and her heroine is suddenly overcome with emotion:

  Belinda’s eyes filled with tears and she experienced one of those sudden moments of joy that sometimes come to us in the middle of an ordinary day. Her heart like a singing bird and all because Agatha didn’t keep as good a table as she did and Miss Prior had forgiven her for the caterpillar and the afternoon sun streaming in through the window over it all.[6]

  The shift in mood and tone is exquisitely rendered, without so much as a bat’s squeak of sentimentality. Pym has found her subject matter and a depth of vision and understanding that her twenty-one-year-old self could not have envisaged.

  Jonathan Cape had urged Pym to be ‘more malicious’, and she put his advice to good use in her rendering of the character of Archdeacon Hoccleve, in which she drew heavily on Henry Harvey’s traits and peccadillos.

  Henry Hoccleve is melodramatic, self-dramatising and lazy; he complains constantly about the amount of work he does, affects an ‘eighteenth-century style melancholy’ and sports a look of ‘malicious amusement’ to those he considers inferior. But he is a fabulous and unforgettable creation. Belinda loves him, despite his many faults: selfish and demanding as he is, he only has to smile at her and she melts. Pym retained many of the old in-jokes. Henry Harvey’s Venetian red socks make an appearance, his blue hat; his phrases such as ‘These yew trees are remarkably fine’; his penchant for Middle English and for quoting the Greater English Poets; his complaints about moths spoiling his clothes; his inability to get up in the morning; his delicate stomach. His habit of reading aloud.

  But, as with Pym, time has dulled Belinda’s passion for Henry and she is able to observe him with cool detachment. When the Archdeacon visits the sick, she notes: ‘There was something about a deathbed that appealed to his sense of the dramatic.’ He loves nothing better than the sound of his own voice: ‘As he could not sing, he made up for it by making his voice heard as much as possible in other ways.’ Belinda observes how he is quick to criticise women: ‘I thought women enjoyed missing their meals and making martyrs of themselves.’ He calls his wife a ‘fool’ for not being a better housewife. The mature Belinda is more cynical about him than the doting undergraduate: ‘[men] just expect meals to appear on the tables and they usually do’. She is thankful that she has escaped marriage to Henry: ‘It was obvious that Agatha had a very difficult time with him.’

  Nevertheless, there is an erotic scene where Belinda darns the Archdeacon’s socks, which leaves her feeling flustered. Knitting and darning become sensual acts. ‘If she has knitted him a pair of socks, perhaps she is not entirely lacking in the feminine arts,’ Belinda notes of a present given to a young curate. Belinda is a very good knitter and darner; Agatha is not. Belinda longs to knit a sweater for Henry, but she knows that his wife will strongly disapprove: ‘Obviously the enterprise was too fraught with dangers to be attempted.’ The sock-darning episode is erotic because Henry is still wearing it. He stretches his long leg onto Belinda’s little chair, so she can reach the hole in his heel. Belinda is so discombobulated that she inadvertently pricks her needle into his foot. She has found the experience ‘upsetting and unnerving’, and she worries about what Agatha will say if she discovers the intimate act.

  Pym’s comic tour de force is Henry’s sermon on the theme of Judgement Day, in which he puts the fear of God into his mild and genteel flock of parishioners:

  The Archdeacon paused impressively and peered at his congregation; a harmless enough collection of people – old Mrs Prior and her daughter, Miss Jenner, Miss Beard and Miss Smily … the Misses Bede and the guests from the vicarage – Count Bianco – Miss Liversidge and Miss Aspinall – of course they did not realise but he was going to tell them. ‘The Judgement Day,’ he almost shouted, so loudly that Harriet had to take out her handkerchief to stifle her inappropriate amusement and old Mrs Prior let out a kind of moan. ‘That day may be soon,’ he went on, ‘it may even be tomorrow.’[7]

  The congregation are shocked and stunned by the ferocity of Henry’s terrifying sermon: ‘Even Belinda thought the Archdeacon was going a little too far when he likened his congregation to such as ‘call aloud for ev’ry bauble drivel’d o’er by sense. Whatever it might mean it certainly sounded abusive.’

  Bishop Grote’s Lantern Lecture (in this version transposed from Hawaii to Africa, suggesting the influence of the International African Institute on Pym’s literary work) is another episode of high comedy. The villagers lapse into uncontrollable giggling as Bishop Grote recites the African alphabet, sings native songs and shows unsuitable images of phallic-like objects – Harriet, who is manning the lantern slides, inserts one image upside down with hilarious effect.

  Pym largely follows her original plot line, though she adds an extra thread – that of the Bishop’s love for Belinda. The scene of his proposal is yet another comic set piece. When she rejects him (shades of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Collins) he soon finds solace in the arms of another willing spinster, Miss Aspinall. Belinda spurns the Bishop’s offer of ‘respect a
nd esteem’, as Pym had once spurned Henry’s similar offer of friendship. However, Belinda also knows that her fervent passion for Henry has ‘mellowed into a comfortable feeling, more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain raptures of a spring morning’.

  Pym did not necessarily follow her agent, her publisher and Jock’s advice to be more malicious in her writing. But she permits a minor key to permeate the mood of her work, which would become one of her leitmotifs: ‘I loved you more than Agatha did, thought Belinda, but all I can do now is keep silent. I can’t even speak to Florrie about the dusty mantelpiece, because it’s nothing to do with me. It never was and it never will be.’[8]

  What Belinda fears above all is losing her sister to marriage and facing the prospect of loneliness and old age.

  CHAPTER V

  In which Miss Pym enters the Age of Dior and the Beveridge Report

  One day in the autumn of 1948, Pym was at Waterloo station. Standing in front of her was a man she recognised. It was Julian Amery. They had not set eyes on each other since before the war. She had read about his courageous and daring exploits, and he had somehow survived. She had survived, too. What happened next? Probably exactly what she anticipated: he took her hand and was his charming self. No more than that. Pym always found it hard to let go of her past loves. As she wrote in Some Tame Gazelle: ‘If only one could clear out one’s mind and heart as ruthlessly as one did one’s wardrobe.’[1]

  A fresh wardrobe was indeed another matter. Clothes rationing ended in 1949 and with it the ‘Make-do and Mend’ campaign. In 1947, Christian Dior launched his ‘New Look’, which contrasted strongly with the more severe fashions of the 1940s. After the hardships of the war, people were ready for a change. Fabric was luxurious and voluminous, the silhouette hourglass rather than boxy, shoulders soft rather than squared. Skirts were full and billowing, falling to below the mid-calf and bodices were extremely tight, accentuating the wasp waist. In order to achieve this look, women wore heavy-duty elasticated underwear or boned corsets. Nylon and elastic that had been used for the war effort began to be used for a variety of clothing, especially undergarments. Harriet Bede’s roll-on elastic corset is used to comic effect in Some Tame Gazelle and her appearance wearing only a Celanese vest and knickers roots her firmly in the post-war synthetic fabric fashion camp.

  These new artificial materials became known as ‘miracle fabrics’, as they could be easily washed and dried. This was important in the post-war world, where domestic help was hard to find. A Hoover advert for the Daily Mail in 1950 promoted ‘Three Servants for Every Housewife: the Hoover cleaner, the new Hoover washing machine and the Hoover floor polisher’.

  Pym was fastidious about her portrayal of clothing in her first novel, where it is often used to denote character. Belinda wears ‘marocain’ (a kind of hard-wearing, tweedy fabric), Harriet velvet and flowered voile, the curate’s combinations are ‘Meridian’. Agatha wears a well-cut dress of striped Macclesfield silk. Edith Liversidge wears a shapeless old-fashioned grey dress with unfashionably narrow shoulders. In the forties and fifties, women’s outdoor clothing was formal. Hats, gloves and scarves were still worn. With more women at work, the fashion magazines aimed their advice at this new burgeoning market. Hair was shorter and the permanent wave meant fewer trips to the hair salon and less work than during the previous decade of waves, pins and victory rolls.

  The government, concerned about the post-war birth rate, was keen to promote marriage, home-making and child-rearing, whilst recognising that women were needed to meet the labour shortage. The 1942 Beveridge Report had emphasised that marriage was a partnership, an economic unit with a division of labour amongst equals, but in practice women still got the short straw: ‘The great majority of married women must be regarded as occupied on work which is vital though unpaid, without which their husbands could not do their paid work and without which the nation could not continue.’[2] A survey of 1951 showed that housewives typically worked a fifteen-hour day.[3]

  Pym worked long hours at the institute, for her modest wage of £5 a week. Hilary’s salary at the BBC was much better and sharing their living expenses helped the finances. Barbara’s bank balance in 1949 was £35.12s.1d., the equivalent of little more than £1,000 today.[4] Pym tried to supplement her income by writing short stories for magazines, such as Harpers and Women and Beauty. Her story ‘The Jumble-Sale’ was published in 1949 by the latter. She also submitted a radio play to the BBC, Something to Remember, which was broadcast in 1950.

  The short stories were never hugely successful and they did not find a market. Her genre was the novel. After she delivered Some Tame Gazelle, she began writing a new novel in her room. In Pym’s short stories, she had been experimenting with first-person narration and this was her first attempt at a full-length novel in a first-person voice. Her desk overlooked St Gabriel’s church and she set her new novel in Pimlico.

  Pym later wrote about what she came to call the ‘Excellent Women Theme’ (its earlier iteration was the ‘Splendid Women’ theme, dating back from her experiences on the home front): ‘I’d probably noticed that unmarried women seemed to be expected to do all kinds of things that nobody else was willing to do.’[5] It was something of which she had personal experience and about which she would write beautifully.

  By January 1950, she had typed eight and a half pages of her new novel. Although Pym stopped writing a formal diary, she began to keep notebooks for diary-like entries and observations:

  Seen from the top of a bus – a woman and clergyman sitting on hard chairs in Green Park and talking with animation.

  Pimlico (Warwick Square) heavy with the scent of lime blossoms.

  Excellent women enjoying discomfort – one bar of a small electric fire, huddled in coats.

  The electricity man comes – has to check among the swinging wet stockings and knickers but the expression of his serious, rather worried blue eyes does not change.

  Men should be given the opportunity for self-sacrifice as they are in their natures so much less noble than women.[6]

  For many readers, Excellent Women is Pym’s masterpiece. In her first draft, she described the book as follows: ‘In brief it is the story of a woman – a pleasant humorous spinster in the middle thirties – who gets continually embroiled in other people’s affairs.’[7] That Pym closely identified with the magnificent Mildred Lathbury is suggested by her notebooks of this period, in which she employs the first-person when she is speaking about her heroine: ‘I go out shopping with Dora and we see Allegra and Fr Malory sitting on deckchairs in the park … Then Allegra asks me to lunch with her – I wonder why? She eats little and makes me feel inferior … what is to be done with Winifrid – can she live with me?’[8]

  John Betjeman, one of Pym’s favourite contemporary poets, would review Excellent Women and give it the highest praise: ‘for me it is a perfect book’. He added, poignantly in a world that had been shattered but not broken by the war: ‘Excellent Women is England and, thank goodness, it is full of them.’

  CHAPTER VI

  In which we read of an Excellent Woman

  It was not only the Beveridge Report that gave considerable attention to the status of married women. Newspapers and women’s magazines also gave undue emphasis to the home-maker and dutiful wife and mother. Magazines such as Woman’s Own and Good Housekeeping greatly increased their circulation, and middle-market newspapers introduced sections especially aimed at a female readership. Lip service was paid occasionally to single, working women, but the majority of the features were devoted to the housewife: how to dress at home, how to raise children, how to get a man to propose – ‘show a bit of leg’ suggested Amy Landreth of the Daily Mail.

  As we have seen, Pym’s letters as far back as 1938 contain many references to herself as a spinster, the term itself having seemingly unattractive connotations. She described herself as ‘an old brown spinster’, a ‘bewildered English spinster’, ‘this dreary spinster’, a ‘l
onely spinster’. By 1950, at the age of thirty-seven, she was (more or less happily) resigned to the fact that she would never marry. ‘Spinsters’ and the state of being unmarried would continue to occupy her creative output.

  In Some Tame Gazelle, Belinda is a ‘contented spinster’. In her next novel, Excellent Women, she would take for her heroine a much younger spinster, Mildred Lathbury, who is in her early thirties. Like Pym, Mildred worked at the Censorship Office during the war, where she ‘learned much of the weakness of human nature’, and now works part time at the ‘Society for the Care of Aged Gentlewomen’. She lives in a London flat with a shared bathroom, overlooking Warwick Square. Mildred worries about who will be there to grieve for her when she is dead. Her underwear is even ‘drearier’ than her friend Dora’s ‘fawn locknit knickers’. She feels ‘spinsterish and useless’ and expects ‘very little – nothing, almost’. Her self-loathing is such that a glance at herself ‘in a dusty ill-lit mirror was enough to discourage anyone’s romantic thoughts’.[1]

  Somehow, Mildred manages to become involved in the lives of the people around her, who in turn appear to give very little consideration to her needs or feelings. From the start, Pym slyly references her literary alter ego: ‘Let me hasten to add that I am not at all like Jane Eyre, who must have given hope to so many plain women who tell their story in the first-person.’ Mildred does not mind very much being single, as she recognises the compensations, but she is constantly being made aware by others that spinsterhood equates to failure. That she is herself a ‘splendid’ or ‘excellent’ woman is of no comfort. She knows that she is capable, sensible and rational, but that only seems to be a reason as to why she is exploited. She is far more Anne Elliot than Jane Eyre.