The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  Should a Man Think You Are a Virgin?

  I can’t imagine why, if you aren’t. Is he?

  Is there anything particularly attractive about a thirty-four year old virgin?[2]

  This is an attitude that chimed with Pym’s liberal attitude to sex in her personal life. She was one of the most liberated, independent women of her time. Ever since Oxford, she had been sexually active and unashamed of being so. One of her friends explained: ‘You see, Barbara liked sex.’[3] Nor did she feel the need to settle down to a conventional married life, despite several offers. The trouble was, her novels of quiet female independence did not exactly brim with sex, drugs and rock and roll.

  And then there was the Profumo affair, a story combining sex and politics that had been bubbling away since 1961, but which in the summer of 1963 would dominate the headlines of every newspaper, as the nation slavered over the ‘call girl’ Christine Keeler and watched the trial and suicide of Dr Stephen Ward with lurid fascination.

  Pym, smarting from her rejection by Jonathan Cape, was further discouraged by the lack of interest from other publishers in novels that seemed tame and outdated. She wrote to Philip Larkin:

  Many thanks for your kind letter of astonishment and indignation … the more one looks at the books now being published, not to mention the stirring events of this year, the less likely it seems that anyone, except a very select few, would want to read a novel by me. I could almost offer my services to Dr Stephen Ward as a ghost writer, for he is a Canon’s son.[4]

  CHAPTER II

  Miss Pym takes Umbrage

  Pym was angry. She wrote a furious letter to her sometime publisher, saying that she felt that she had been badly treated. Wren Howard of Cape was obdurate, telling her that her books had not brought any profit and with the closure of Smith’s circulating libraries and the reduction of Boots’ libraries, novels were harder and harder to sell.

  Her friends rallied. Philip Larkin wrote again to say that he was bewildered that Cape were taking this line. Jock wrote that a new editor, Tom Maschler, was probably responsible. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Jock had defected to another smaller publisher the year before. According to Pym, Maschler had ‘off-loaded’ other loyal authors in favour of only publishing bestsellers ‘like Ian Fleming’. She was reduced to the humiliating task of touting the manuscript of An Unsuitable Attachment to other publishing houses, meeting again and again with rejection:

  23 April Posted Unsuitable Attachment to Heath …

  3 May Heath returned Unsuitable Attachment …

  30th May Sent Unsuitable Attachment to Ivor Guest at Longmans …

  6 June Had Unsuitable Attachment back from Longmans.[1]

  It was ill luck that the novel’s central thesis – that a cross-class relationship was widely regarded as ‘unsuitable’ – seemed horribly out of kilter with the times. The publishers who rejected the book missed her irony, rather as generations of ‘Janeites’ have imagined Austen to be a romantic novelist: far from endorsing the notion that such liaisons were ‘unsuitable’, she was fully prescient of the allure in the idea of ‘posh girls’ dumbing down. Princess Margaret’s romance with Tony Armstrong-Jones was only the most high-profile example. The photographer David Bailey pursued middle- and upper-class girls: ‘all us working-class lads love a posh girl’, he famously remarked.

  Novels such as John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957) had glamorised the working-class hero. The problem for Pym was that her working-class hero, John Challow, wasn’t sufficiently well drawn. Part of her knew this and she would have been happy to revise the novel if Cape had given her the chance. As she wrote to Philip Larkin: ‘I fear the attachment is not so unsuitable as some of the public (reading) might wish.’[2]

  It felt especially hard to be considered behind the times when she was in so many ways ahead of them. The Wolfenden Report of 1957 had recommended the legalisation of homosexuality, and then only for men over the age of twenty-one, but decriminalisation did not come for another full decade. Pym’s novels, in which homosexual men (from different social classes) lived happily together, older women had love affairs with younger men, and free-spirited young women such as Prudence Bates dated married men and conducted love affairs outside of marriage, were anything but prim. If only Cape had had the wit to see beyond the genteel facade of her social comedies and find the grit below.

  Pym was now working on another story about a woman’s love for a homosexual man, though this time with a new twist. Pym’s ‘annus horribilis’ had been brightened by one silver lining. The previous summer, Bob Smith had introduced her to a friend he had met on holiday in Greece. He was an extremely good-looking, charming and much younger man. His name was Richard Campbell Roberts, though he was known to his friends as Skipper. Pym fell catastrophically in love.

  CHAPTER III

  Hullo Skipper

  Pym was now approaching fifty. She was feeling her age in a world she was increasingly finding uncongenial and alien. The sixties era, with its emphasis on youth culture, seemed to be so very different to her own and yet, she too had experienced much in her lifetime. She wrote to Bob Smith expressing her feelings as she approached middle age: ‘I thought, surging through Smith’s in Fleet Street today, I’m just a tired-looking middle aged woman to all these (mostly young) people: yet I have had quite a life and written (or rather published) six novels which have been praised in the highest circles.’[1]

  Despite believing herself to be ‘tired-looking’, she was still attractive, with her charming ‘lop-sided smile’. Her friends and acquaintances remember her as tall and well-dressed but a little remote and reserved. Hilary was the more lively sister. Life had bruised Pym. The giggling Oxford undergraduate in her outlandish ‘Sandra’ clothes had given way to a more sober, reflective and careworn woman. But she was still open to love and being loved.

  And then, in the summer of 1962, she met Skipper. He was virile-looking, rugged and handsome, with a gorgeous wide smile. He was eighteen years Pym’s junior and hailed from the Bahamas, where his family had been amongst the first white settlers. The Roberts were prosperous and lived in a large, ocean-front colonial-style mansion called ‘Lucky Hill’, perched on the crest of a promontory overlooking Montague Bay in Nassau. Richard’s father, Sir George Roberts, was a lumber merchant who subsidised and standardised the transformation of mail-boats. Three of his vessels were named after his three sons, Richard, Gary and Noël.

  Sir George Roberts also played a leading role in the political life of the Bahamas. He was a leader of Government House from 1949–54 and then president of the legislative council. He married Freda Genevieve Sawyer in 1929 and Richard, their eldest son, was born the same year. Pym was just a few years younger than Richard’s mother, with whom he had a complicated relationship. He told Pym stories about her grand life in the Bahamas, her magnificent jewels and her black butler. She owned peacocks. Pym was fascinated. His life in this exotic location seemed to her full of rich material for fiction, but she feared it was beyond her range.

  Skipper was exciting and glamorous, but he also possessed a ‘little-boy-lost’ appeal. He had never had a proper job and seemed aimless and lacking in purpose. Every winter he returned home to Nassau. In the summer, in England, he dabbled in antiques and art. Skipper made and lost friends. He was sometimes unreliable. He was also hiding a secret from his family. Skipper was homosexual.

  It appears that Pym knew about Skipper’s sexual orientation from the start, but it did not prevent her from falling deeply in love with him. He seemed to enjoy her affection and attention. He was impressed by the fact that Pym had published many novels and was highly regarded by his friend, Bob Smith. Their relationship grew slowly, with dinner invitations and the exchange of books.

  Skipper’s London flat was located in the glamorous district of Lancaster Gate, a stone’s throw from Hyde Park. It was an elegant two-bedroomed apartment in a white stucco building, a far cry from Brooksville Avenue. He shared his flat with an actor
called Maurice Quick. Pym wrote several letters to Skipper, which he found ‘almost as charming as your novels with [their] shafts of irony’. It was not long before ‘Dear Barbara’ became ‘Dearest’ and then ‘Darling Barbara’.[2]

  CHAPTER IV

  Miss Pym visits Keats’s House in Hampstead

  For the eleven years that Pym lived in Brooksville Avenue, she did not publish a single novel. But she did not stop writing. As with many writers, it was a compulsion. Her notebooks reveal several different plot lines.

  One idea, inspired by her work at the African Institute, was on that favourite theme of anthropologists, polygamy: ‘An old woman living in a village with her two husbands (a modern instance of polyandry), one divorced – but, poor thing, unable to cope on his own.’ The first husband would live in a shed in the bottom of the garden, where hot dinners are sent down. The second husband, Hilary, wouldn’t mind sharing the house with the first husband, but is worried about what the villagers might think of the arrangement: ‘few of these good people are familiar with what one might call polyandry’. Another was a story about a middle-aged woman with an Italian lover: ‘His hatred of Naples and Neapolitans. Love of Guinness. He eats too quickly whereas she likes to linger over her food. He is preoccupied with death.’[1]

  Skipper was beginning to join Pym’s social circle, meeting Jock Liddell in Athens during a summer break. Jock wrote to Pym to say that he had enjoyed talking to Skipper and his friend ‘Michael from Bangkok’. Back in England, dining with the Pym sisters, Skipper told the sisters all about the ‘literati’ who flocked to see Jock. He had invited Skipper and Michael from Bangkok to an event with the novelist Elizabeth Taylor. Skipper thought Taylor very bored, but Pym assured him that boredom was her usual manner, which concealed her shyness.

  Skipper invited the Pym sisters to a cosy dinner in his flat. He then returned to Nassau to spend Christmas with his parents and sent what Barbara described as a very pagan Christmas card. She prepared for winter, cleaning her paraffin stove, filling the coal shed and turning a small dining room into a winter sitting room.

  After her rejection from Cape, Pym had put An Unsuitable Attachment aside and started to write a new novel, which she called Spring. In her notebook of 1962, she noted down that she had bought a little Italian bowl, with a lemon and leaves painted inside. It was chipped, but still gave her immense pleasure: ‘I begin to wonder if I’m getting to the stage when objects could please more than people or (specifically) men.’ Objects and antiques also reminded her of Denton Welch and the use he made of them in his novels. But meeting Skipper and sharing his love of antiques had given her a plot point for the new novel she was writing: ‘A man, dealer in antiques, goes to a parish jumble sale in search of Victoriana and there gets involved in things he would rather not have experienced.’[2]

  In August, on a soggy day, Pym made a pilgrimage to John Keats’s house in Hampstead. The outlook was disappointing, with a view of ugly modern houses. Inside it was ‘austere and simple’, and she noted the red stone engagement ring that Keats had given to Fanny Brawne: ‘almandine: a garnet of violet tin … set in gold’. The curator had filled the conservatory with flowers, begonias, pelargoniums, geraniums and bunches of grapes hanging from a vine. ‘We try to keep it a thing of beauty,’ said the curator, quoting Keats.[3] Pym would use the visit for the setting of an important scene in her new novel.

  She also went to the new Henry Moore–Francis Bacon exhibition in the underground gallery at Bond Street. She was alone and noted other solitary visitors. In a grand antique shop in Bond Street, she observed a young man sitting alone, waiting for customers. Thinking of herself and Skipper, it occurred to her that a woman admirer might be a great nuisance always going in to see him.

  Pym still cherished hopes of publishing An Unsuitable Attachment. Skipper had also suggested a new title, ‘Run Away Love’. But she replied firmly: ‘This is not a B Pym title.’ She toyed with several new titles: Wrapped in Lemon Leaves; A Plate of Lemon; The Lemon Leaves; A Lemon Spring; Hidden in Lemon Leaves …

  10th July Sent Wrapped in Lemon Leaves to Macmillan

  1 August Wrapped in Lemon Leaves came back from Macmillan.[4]

  Another rejection. A note of sourness crept into her journal as she gave vent to her feelings towards Cape and their insistence on ‘contemporary novels’: ‘men and Americans’ seemed to be all the rage. The final straw, she told Larkin, came when she heard that Cape were about to publish a book by ‘one of the Beatles: John Lennon? I think?’[5]

  Skipper invited the Pym sisters to an opening of an exhibition of Thai paintings. She went along, pleased to see that the champagne was flowing and the exhibition splendid: ‘but all the pictures are much too expensive for us’. Skipper was attentive, ‘very sweet and wearing a becoming summer suit of some dark silky material’.[6]

  Pym told Bob Smith that Hilary was now secretary of the parish council at St Lawrence’s. Still smarting over Cape’s rejection, she told Bob: ‘Who wants to read mild novels by Barbara Pym?’ Pym usually met with Bob when he came back to the UK for an annual visit and they often dined in Soho, enjoying osso buco – Italian braised veal and vegetables. Pym promised she would write a scene in which their favourite dish was eaten. Bob had a new companion, ‘a wicked friend from Lagos’.

  Life at the institute, though busy, was not fulfilling. She told Bob: ‘I am writing this in the office on a Friday afternoon, surrounded by the raw material for the April Africa, the proofs of various books and a shopping bag containing tins of cat food, frozen fish cakes, packet soups etc.’[7] Daryll Forde arranged for a performance of an adaptation of Amos Tutuola’s controversial Nigerian novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952). Based on Yoruba folktales, this was the first African novel to be published in England. Pym was unimpressed: ‘That would be one entertainment Miss Pym would not like to attend.’[8]

  Much of Pym’s leisure time was now taken up with St Lawrence’s. She told Bob that many of the congregation were Nigerians and that many of the adults were being baptised. A pretty girl called Florence asked Pym to stand as godmother. After the ceremony there was a party with Coca-Cola, British wine, tea, cake, biscuits ‘and delicious Nigerian rice and fish with hot peppery sauce’.[9]

  There had been another burglary at Brooksville Avenue and so the sisters installed a metal frame over the kitchen window, where the intruders were getting in. Skipper, meanwhile, was opening an antique shop in Sloane Street. It was called L’Atelier and he was planning to decorate it with indigo walls and a purple carpet. He donated some antiques to the St Lawrence’s Christmas bazaar and asked Pym to go to the theatre with him. She had given him copies of A Glass of Blessings and Excellent Women. He told her that he found the latter witty, but ‘terribly sad’. She wrote to Bob: ‘Why is it that men find my books so sad? Women don’t particularly. Perhaps they have a slight guilt feeling that this is what they do to us and yet really it isn’t as bad as all that.’[10]

  It is interesting that Skipper made no comment on A Glass of Blessings, in which the heroine falls in love with a homosexual man, eventually accepting and befriending his lover. Pym’s friends joked that she made events happen in real life by first writing about them. Her fleeting attraction to Bob Smith and her admiration for Denton Welch may have given her the plot point of a woman falling for a homosexual man, but her relationship with Skipper proved just how painful it could be. In her novels, homosexual men were often drawn in the Denton Welch versus Eric Oliver mould, playing off the sensitive, effete, fragile one (Denton) against his hunky, unintellectual foil (Eric). The problem with Skipper was that he was the perfect composite: he was extremely masculine and macho, with his broad shoulders and strong physique, but he was also sensitive, artistic and intelligent, with a love of antiques and objets d’art.

  Skipper would break Pym’s heart, but the relationship inspired her greatest novel, which she would call The Sweet Dove Died.

  CHAPTER V

  Of Wistfulness and Whitsun Weddings


  Philip Larkin was one of the first people Pym contacted when faced with her humiliating rejection from Cape. His support was instantaneous and his resentment fierce. For the rest of her life, he never stopped fighting for her rehabilitation. As in the early days Jock had encouraged and supported Pym’s writing, helped her to find a publisher and an agent, now Larkin took on that role. He and Pym shared a similar sense of humour, a love of the commonplace and trivial, and a dislike of publicity. Larkin guarded his private life and was happy living in the relative obscurity of Hull. Pym wrote: ‘Yes, I have a shrinking from publicity too, which is just as well as I seem to be doomed to failure and to sink down into obscurity.’[1]

  But it would be a mistake to suggest that the relationship was one-sided. Pym was just as encouraging, probing Larkin as to why he didn’t write more novels (she suggested, accurately, that first and foremost he wanted to be a novelist rather than a poet) and frequently, though gently, pressing for another volume of poetry. They shared memories of Oxford. Pym had not read Jill, which was to be shortly reissued by Larkin’s new publisher, Faber and Faber. Larkin planned to write a new introduction: ‘an anti-twenties piece – no ortolans or Diaghilev or Harold Acton or Sebastian Flyte, just grammar school boys clumping about in OTC uniform and one bottle of wine a term (the ration)’.[2] Pym responded with her own ‘thirties’ version of Oxford:

  I suppose when you were at Oxford nobody came into The George wearing a silver lamé shirt or went around with a lizard on their shoulders or carried a toy kangaroo – and that was the early thirties when I was up. But surely there must have been girls, even in the austere one-bottle-of-wine a term forties (shoulder-length pageboy hair, square shoulders and short skirts).[3]