by Paula Byrne
By the end of the year, Miss Pym and Mr Larkin were now ‘Philip and Barbara’. Larkin told her that his girlfriend, Monica, was a Pym addict and her favourite character was Catherine Oliphant in Less Than Angels; ‘curiously enough my least favoured’, he added. Pym responded: ‘Catherine used to be quite a favourite heroine of mine but she now seems less real to me than Wilmet and Prudence (my own favourites).’[4] Larkin, knowing her deep disappointment and the blow to her confidence, was keeping her characters alive. He went to a librarians’ conference, joking that nobody fainted, as a character in A Glass of Blessings does in a similar setting.
One silver lining in an otherwise dull and cold Christmas was a letter from Skipper, who was back in the Bahamas. He revealed his ‘inferiority complexes’ and his troubled relationship with his mother. He had had a ‘fearful row’ with her and confessed to Pym that, although he knew his mother loved him, she ‘disliked him intensely as a person’.[5] He hated the ‘rich proles’ and ‘tax dodgers’ who flocked to the Bahamas in search of winter sun and told her that he avoided town, only going in to buy a copy of The Times: ‘The latter I find is as necessary to me as tea is to you.’
He added: ‘We must try to do some of the things in 64 that were impossible last year for a great number of reasons, like repeat visits to the Kardomah.’[6] The Kardomah, which makes several appearances in Pym’s novels, was one of her favourite cafes. It originated as a coffee shop in Liverpool, close to the Cavern Club, and became a haunt for the Beatles. Pym frequented the London Kardomah, on Piccadilly, which boasted a bright wall mural of peacocks. She liked the cosy basement and spent many an hour there with Skipper.
Pym told Bob Smith that her new novel ‘was beginning to flow … and ideas come crowding into BP’s bounding heart and teeming brain’. She did not tell Bob that Skipper was the inspiration. But her frequent mentions of him in her letters reveal her growing infatuation. She had visited his antique shop just before Christmas: ‘He comes to see us quite often, his car now knowing the way down Carlton Vale.’[7]
By now, Pym had discovered the identity of the mystery woman mentioned at the furniture storage unit, which had given a plot line for A Glass of Blessings. She was called Joan Wales and was a friend of both Skipper and Bob. Pym had now met Joan and she told Bob how much she liked her and hoped the feeling was mutual. Bob had asked Pym to give Joan a turn of having the furniture she had borrowed from him. He told Pym that he would give it back to her in his will. Pym thought that the whole saga was like something out of a Henry James novel. ‘Even I dried-up, cynical and disillusioned as I am, haven’t yet got to the stage when I would prefer a few nice pieces of furniture to a dear friend,’ she joked.[8]
The sad truth was that Barbara did have to be careful with her finances. With only her poor pay at the institute, she was missing the extra income from her novels. She did not want to become over-reliant on her sister. The year before, they had renovated their kitchen and put in a lovely yellow and white sink, but it meant that their annual holiday had to be postponed. They were now planning an early summer holiday in May. Hilary had been saving for an extended trip to Greece and Barbara planned to join her for part of it and see Jock in Athens.
Skipper invited her to dinner, often with his actor flatmate Maurice Quick. One time, Joan Wales was there. Pym felt jealous:
bit much to have to listen to Maurice Quick praising Joan and saying ‘what a lovely sense of humour’ she has when I sit there dumb and uninteresting. How often do women have to listen to praise of other women and (if they are nice) just sit there agreeing. And yet men don’t do it maliciously, just in their simplicity.[9]
On Easter Sunday, Pym went to supper with Skipper: ‘We eat cosily in almost total darkness (one candle).’ On the mantelpiece she noticed many Easter cards and a telegram – testaments to his popularity. But it somehow made her feel sad: ‘One couldn’t really give him anything that he hadn’t already got. It gives one a hopeless sort of feeling.’ His bedroom was flamboyant: ‘Roman Emperors … on the wall facing the bed which is large and covered in orange candlewick.’[10]
On May Day, she and Skipper went to the opera at Covent Garden. They sat in the Crush Bar, ‘the great oil paintings, the flowers (real)’ – Skipper crunching ice as they drank orangeade. Already, Pym was turning her own latest crush into a fictional scenario. Her heroine – a beautiful, elegant widow – falls in love with a homosexual/bisexual man, but they embark on an intense affair: ‘If “they” went to Covent Garden Leonora would like to feel the touch of his sleeve against her bare arm … Close, intimate red and gold semi-darkness.’ The figure based on Skipper was initially called Quinton (later changed to James). ‘Quinton plays his part with rather self-conscious enjoyment.’ Pym, with her capacity for self-knowledge, knew that the fictionalised Skipper was based on fantasy: ‘Here he is mine she thinks, the young admirer she has created for herself.’[11]
In February, Philip Larkin sent her a copy of his new poetry collection, The Whitsun Weddings. She was delighted: ‘I wondered if I’d ever told you how much I liked your poems.’[12] One of her favourites, she said, was ‘Faith Healing’. It depicts a (Billy Graham-like) male American faith-healer, who is administering hope to a line of unloved, unfulfilled women. The women are in need of kindness and redemption. They are given their ‘twenty seconds’ of the faith-healer’s benediction, before being moved on:
In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.[13]
Larkin’s collection sold 4,000 copies within two months of publication and established him as perhaps England’s most popular poet. Like Betjeman’s poetry, it spoke to the common wo(man) in the post-war age, but with an absence of nostalgia or sentimentality. He wrote about the everyday world that people knew and in language they understood, somehow transforming the mundane into something magnificent. His theme, like Pym’s, was provincial England, spiritual despair and the thwarted lives of such figures as ‘Mr Bleaney’, deceased previous occupant of a rented bedsitting room, bleakly furnished with, ‘Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook/ Behind the door, no room for books or bags’. The narrator is forced to confront his own life choices: ‘That how we live measures our own nature.’[14] And yet, in the collection there are moments of great beauty and affirmation in poems such as ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, and ‘Love Songs in Age’. Larkin told Pym that he had ordered the poems in The Whitsun Weddings to create a variety of moods so that if the reader wasn’t enjoying one, then at least the next one would be different.
In July, Larkin reread all of Pym’s novels, ‘in one fell swoop’. He told her that Some Tame Gazelle was her Pride and Prejudice, ‘rich and untroubled and confident and very funny’. Excellent Women was even better than he remembered, ‘full of a harsh kind of suffering … it’s the study of the pain of being single, the unconscious hurt the world regards as this state’s natural clothing’. Mildred, he felt (much in the vein of Jock Liddell), ‘is suffering but nobody can see why she shouldn’t suffer, like a Victorian cab horse’. Larkin’s analysis and close reading were exact and he cut to the heart of Pym’s genius in his observation of her ability to capture mood: ‘Once again I have marvelled at the richness of detail and variety of mood and setting.’ John Betjeman had visited Larkin and they ‘rejoiced’ together over her work.[15]
Philip’s kind encouragement helped Pym to begin writing again. She had written almost eight chapters of her new novel about an older woman falling in love with a homosexual man. She was also revising An Unsuitable Attachment. Jock had promised to edit it and offer suggestions for improvement, so she took the manuscript with her when she visited him.
In May, Barbara and Hilary set off for Greece. Pym enjoyed Athens, finding Jock much the same
as ever, only fatter with white hair. She also saw Henry Harvey and his second wife. She took a boat tour around some of the Greek islands and had a happy time, but she was still feeling insecure and vulnerable. Jock threw a party, inviting his other novelist friends, Elizabeth Taylor and Mary Renault. The latter had graduated from Oxford a few years before Pym, met a fellow nurse called Julie Mullard while training at the Radcliffe Infirmary (they remained a couple all their lives), nursed Dunkirk evacuees, won a massive $150,000 prize from MGM studios for her first post-war novel, and had now embarked on the writing of a string of best-selling historical novels set in an ancient Greece unapologetically brimming with homosexuality. She arrived resplendent in gold lamé. Barbara berated herself as: ‘Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple black.’ At a local taverna, Pym noticed the displays of food and lurking black cats. In the beautiful Zappeion gardens, oranges dripped from trees and the garden shrubs smelled deliciously fragrant. Her imagination was let loose: ‘here a middle-aged English or American lady might be picked up by a young Greek adventurer’.[16]
She was back home in London at the beginning of June, leaving Hilary to stay in Greece for several more weeks. In her sister’s absence, Pym’s friendship with Skipper took on a new intensity. She planned to celebrate her fifty-first birthday with him. Just the two of them.
CHAPTER VI
Darling Richard
At his new flat in Sussex Gardens near Paddington railway station, Skipper poured champagne and gave Pym a lovely present – a Victorian china cup and saucer with a frieze of a lady and her cat. This was generous, since Skipper disliked cats and had taken a particular objection to Pym’s beloved Minerva, and teased Pym for the way she spoiled her.
Pym’s friends worried that she would feel lonely without Hilary, but she took the opportunity to visit her father in Oswestry, noting that Dor, although eighty-five, was still alert and pottering about the house. And Skipper was an attentive and amusing companion; Pym enjoyed being escorted around London in the company of this handsome, energetic much younger man. Without the vigilant and beady eye of Hilary, who had taken on the role of Pym’s protector, Skipper was free to flirt and have fun. But there was also a darker side to his ebullient personality, which Pym was soon to discover.
The pair spent much of the summer of 1964 together: ‘Oh what a month August was too!’ By now he was ‘Darling Richard’. They walked in Hampstead, went to the Huguenot Cemetery – ‘all beautiful in the dark, warm evening’. In a little Roman Catholic church, Skipper lit a candle. Pym decided not to light one herself and was reduced to silence: ‘It is a bit too much like something in a BP novel.’ There were romantic walks to Windmill Hill, Admiral’s House and the home of the novelist John Galsworthy. They played a game of peeping into people’s uncurtained windows and even letterboxes. Skipper’s letters suggest the intensity of the relationship: ‘My Darling Barbara, How marvellous last night was – it smoothed over the rough patches of the last week with great gentleness. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.’[1]
Their time together was interrupted when Skipper’s father died suddenly. He turned to Pym for comfort: ‘The warmth of your affection has done so much for me that words really fail to express my gratitude.’ And then dashed back to Nassau to comfort his mother and sort out the complex legal problems around his father’s death. His mother refused to wear widow’s black, arousing the ire of the local community and Skipper was horrified that his mother expected him to make his permanent home with her; a wish he had no intention of fulfilling. He wrote evocatively of the beautiful weather in the Bahamas: ‘Each morning brings the dawn blessing – a gentle sweet rain that makes the garden a Paradise by breakfast time – I know how much you would love it.’[2] But there was no invitation to his island Eden; no doubt he was anxious about how his mother would feel about his relationship with a woman close to her own age.
Pym asked him to read An Unsuitable Attachment and make suggestions. Despite his appearance as charming but flighty, he read it with great attention. He thought it ‘excellent’ but flawed, and offered wise and constructive advice for improving the narrative. He told her to cut some of the extraneous details, and focus more on the central relationship between Ianthe and John Challow. Above all, he saw that the main problem was Pym’s depiction of a working-class hero. He told her that Challow needed more work: might he be Irish? He said she should base him upon the working-class naval officer she met in Naples; to reveal his charm, his being touched by the ‘Blarney stone’ – perhaps show him flirting with another woman, arousing Ianthe’s jealousy. Skipper felt that the scene where Ianthe visits Challow’s bedsit should be more erotically developed: ‘She must respond to his physical attractions, say hairs on bare arms (as he sleeps in an old shirt which would also explain him not getting out of bed) and longs to touch him. Pity, tenderness, lust, love.’ Pym read his suggestions carefully, noting ‘does a gentlewoman know it as lust? Well, what do you think?’[3]
Skipper advised more chapters revealing John’s inner thoughts about Ianthe, his desire to be a gentleman, the way he looks up to her but also ‘lusts’ after her – that word again. He was correct to see that Pym had not sufficiently drawn out the sexual chemistry between her central characters. His frankness about the revelation of female desire also hit a nerve with Pym, given her increasing sexual attraction to him. In her notebook, she expressed some of her feelings about falling in love with a homosexual man, as usual conflating the heroine (Leonora) with herself: ‘She thinks perhaps this is the kind of love I’ve always wanted because absolutely nothing can be done about it.’[4]
Perhaps in order to please Skipper, and missing him in the Bahamas, Pym began visiting antique shops in London. Bourdon House was a superior shop, where she fancied a nice pair of mirrors, but balked at the prices – even the smallest malachite egg would have set her back seven guineas, which she did not have. She stored up all the details of her ‘antiquing’ for use in the new novel. In her letters to ‘Darling Richard’, meanwhile, Pym hinted at her loneliness. When she arrived back at her house, after being away for the weekend, she found it looking sad and neglected: ‘dusty and full of dead flowers – perhaps a not inappropriate setting for a not-very-well-with-it novelist … how full of fictional situations life is! I am now making fuller use of all this and have gone back to writing a novel that I started some months ago.’[5]
In August there was a quarrel. Pym had written a love letter to Skipper, which she then regretted and asked to be returned. When he sent it back (without a covering note), she felt ashamed and foolish about her ‘silly and capricious’ behaviour. Then, somehow making it all worse, she wrote again, apologising for her behaviour and then repeating her sentiments: ‘Anyway, this little note will contain all the fondness of the other letter, in a concentrated form like a cube of chicken stock or oxo.’ She told Skipper that she was ‘alone so much’, and ended her letter wishing that he were ‘very well and reasonably happy – no more of those sad looks that cut me to the heart, Skipper dear’.[6]
The relationship seemed to be following the usual course, with Pym making most of the running and pulling back the power, using her status of novelist as her strongest suit. Then, when he got back to London, Skipper telephoned Pym and asked if she would leave him all her literary notebooks. ‘No. No’, she reacted – but then suggested to herself that ‘he should certainly have’ notebook number XX, and ‘Perhaps this one too.’[7] She had told Skipper that he was inspiring scenes in her latest novel, though she did not share the extent to which he was shaping the narrative.
To Philip Larkin, however, she was less positive and more realistic about her literary prospects: ‘But every now and then I feel gloomy about it all and wonder if anybody will ever want to publish anything of mine again.’[8] She confessed to Bob Smith her feeling that her life was full of things ‘that didn’t quite happen’. Skipper had introduced her to one of his boyfriends, John Clark, and they had all gone for a walk in Kew Gardens. Pym found Clark amusing, but t
iring. Skipper told Pym ‘he is nothing, now’. Confused, she wrote to Bob asking for confirmation (‘Is this true?’) and telling him of her moments of ‘gloom and pessimism, when it seems as if nobody could ever like my style of writing again’.[9]
Pym was feeling rejection both public and private. She had a foot injury, and was working from home and considering going part-time from the institute, though she could not afford to do so: ‘The trouble is I rather lack confidence in myself at the moment and in my ability to earn enough money.’ Even church life seemed to be in a decline: the size of the congregation at St Lawrence’s dwindled Sunday to Sunday, due to a combination of, ‘Rome, Death and Umbrage. A good title for a novel, don’t you think?’
She confided in Bob, sharing her financial woes, her gloom about the church and her worries about Skipper, who was becoming increasingly cranky and ill-tempered. She blamed it on the antique business: ‘I only wish I could do something to help him.’ She joked that if she were famous, he could sell her letters to Sotheby’s. She thought it best to leave him to go his way. She also realised that, deep down, Skipper was unhappy: ‘I wish he could be happier, but I don’t think it’s in his nature. I love Bob, I love Richard, I love Rice Krispies … perhaps it is better in the end just to love Rice Krispies.’[10]
CHAPTER VII
The Tale of the Sweet Bahamian and the Goddess of Brooksville
‘Are you going to fry them?’ He asked anxiously.
‘Yes – why not?’ Immediately she was on the defensive and saw the kitchen as it must appear to his half-American eyes – the washing up from lunchtime, the litter of things not thrown away and the paw-marks on the table.