The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

by Paula Byrne

  More good news was to follow. That year, 1977, Larkin was chair of the judges for the Booker Prize for the best novel of the year. ‘So at least I can get you read by the panel,’ he wrote.[3] He also enclosed a fan letter about her that he had received from John Bayley. The BBC’s Will Wyatt came to Finstock to make a short film about Pym for The Book Programme.

  Pym was especially pleased that The Sweet Dove Died was finally going to be published: ‘I feel it is one of the best I have ever done.’[4] The BBC film would be called Tea with Miss Pym, and feature Lord David Cecil. The filming went well: footage in the churchyard and then tea in the garden with Cecil, who had driven over for the occasion. Minerva the cat provided comic relief, trying to put her paw into the jug of milk. ‘Lord D and I chatted and we agreed that the whole thing might easily have lapsed into farce, rather like the Mad Hatter’s tea party.’ Pym enjoyed the experience immensely. Her only worry was when it was suggested that her treatment of men implied she had a low opinion of the sex. ‘My instinctive reply sprang to my lips, “Oh, but I love men,” but luckily I realised how it would sound, so said something feeble.’[5] Then, in August, it was off to the BBC in Bristol to do a feature for Woman’s Hour.

  Pym’s world was enlarging in a way she had never expected. Advance copies of Quartet in Autumn arrived at the same time as a large box of copies of reissues from Cape, ‘in beautiful brilliant colours with my name in enormous letters!’[6] Then the Guardian called for a piece and even fashionable Harpers & Queen.

  In September, The Times published a full-page feature under the headline ‘How Barbara Pym was rediscovered after 16 years out in the cold’. It reported that, at the time of the TLS article, ‘Her publisher, Jonathan Cape, was at first even doubtful whether she was still alive.’[7] The journalist Caroline Moorehead had been to see Pym at the cottage in Finstock and heard of how, in the 1960s, she had been turned down by twenty publishers. Moorehead asked her what she would do if she made a lot of money from her newfound fame: to the interviewer’s astonishment, Pym replied, with her old spirit of adventure, that she and her sister would go by Concorde to Latin America.

  She was also becoming the object of academic study: an Italian student writing her thesis on Pym’s novels arrived at Finstock for an interview, ‘wearing mauve-tinted’ glasses. On publication day in the autumn, Pym received a telegram from James Wright and an enormous card from Larkin with a sketch of a dragon labelled ‘Maschler’, its heart pierced with a spear. Happiness beams from her letters. She thought the Guardian article better than the Times interview: ‘and surely those photographs show that slightly mad jolly fun face (that I don’t much like)’. What she really wanted was to cultivate a ‘dark brooding expression, but don’t think I ever could’.[8]

  David Cecil wrote to say that he had seen their television programme, Tea with Miss Pym, advertised in the Radio Times for broadcast on Friday 21 October at 11.25 p.m., adding: ‘I had always thought this was the hour reserved for the late-night Horror Films.’ They had talked of Jane Austen and he said: ‘I think I am rather glad that Jane Austen died when she did. For me, she is the last fine flower of 18th century civilisation.’[9] Larkin wrote, following the transmission: ‘How pretty and luxuriant the garden looked. I thought you were jolly good – unflappable and cool.’[10]

  The garden did, indeed, look luxuriant with white roses and foxgloves. David Cecil, in a light summer suit, described Pym as a novelist who wrote about quiet people in comedies that were devoid of sentimentality. Pym, dressed in a printed blue and white dress, stroked Minerva and spoke fluently and concisely, though she comes across as modest and shy. She wrote in her notebook: ‘Quite pleasing and not too embarrassing. Finstock looked better than it really does in various shots.’[11]

  Pym had sent Larkin copies of the Cape reprints, with a grateful inscription in each volume. Larkin had endorsed the novels with a quotation. She joked that he should be asking her for a rake of the royalties. Larkin responded: ‘It really is a deep joy to me to contemplate them – not unmixed joy, because I want to set my teeth in the necks of various publishers and shake them like rats – but a great pleasure nevertheless. I take a selfish pleasure in seeing my name on them.’ He was still angry about her years of neglect, ‘but nice to think that good writing wins through in the end’.[12]

  Now Pym awaited the reviews of Quartet in Autumn, and to hear whether, as Larkin had hinted, she might be nominated for the Booker Prize.

  CHAPTER III

  Miss Pym plays a Quartet in Autumn

  The first draft of what would become Quartet in Autumn had been written in 1971, whilst Pym was recovering in hospital: ‘Obviously one falls a little for one’s surgeon. How easily might some lonely, slightly deranged spinster carry this passion to unnatural and embarrassing lengths, going to his home, sending him presents etc. The surgeon would, of course be used to women falling for him.’[1] Once again, she was using her own experience. Pym’s novels (published and unpublished) are a candid reflection of her life and times from her Oxford days in the thirties; her time spent in Nazi Germany; working on the home front during the war; her service with the Wrens; her post-war working-woman years in London; the swinging sixties; and now the experience of hospitalisation in the National Health Service in the 1970s.

  Pym’s interest in trivia, ephemera, the life of ordinary things, roots her novels into specific times and yet they somehow transcend the quotidian and take on a timeless quality. As with Jane Austen, her realism is what enables her readers to inhabit her world, her characters, her sense of place and mood. She was often praised for her ‘miniaturist’ style, the perfection of her small canvas, though she was frustrated by this reductive view – the small things are the important things she said, over and over again. Yet few critics perceived how bold and innovative she was. Her hilarious portrait of aesthetes Michael and Gabriel in Crampton Hodnet (‘we like to express ourselves through movement’) seem as modern now as when she was breathing life into them in the 1930s. Her sexually liberated women, such as Prudence Bates, were well ahead of their time, way before the advent of the sixties and the contraceptive pill. In A Glass of Blessings, Pym depicts a woman’s hopeless love for a homosexual man; in The Sweet Dove Died, an older woman’s obsession for a much younger bisexual man. There is nothing old-fashioned or ‘cosy’ about her themes.

  Now in the seventies, Pym wrote about loneliness of old age and about the welfare state. She wrote about post-war immigration. She wrote about a woman in her sixties, enduring a mastectomy and dying alone, having starved herself to death, despite being under the care of a social worker.

  In Quartet in Autumn, Pym was innovative in taking four people, bound together only by working in the same office; they are unskilled, inarticulate, poorly educated – not her usual world at all – and depicting them in old age, on the brink of retirement. Two of her characters live in bleak bedsitting rooms. The four characters, Norman, Edwin, Letty and Marcia do not have children or spouses and little in the way of extended families. They need one another, though there is no natural empathy or kinship between them. They live on the margins of society, often overlooked, making do.

  The public library (no longer Boots’ circulating library) is a place where the four characters gather, but do not meet. They go alone at lunchtime. It has become their church. Their preoccupations are solitary. Edwin goes to consult Crockford’s Clerical Dictionary (as Pym once did) to ‘find out’ about a new clergyman who has been appointed to one of the churches he frequents; Norman and Marcia come to the library because it is warm and a ‘free’ place to sit. Only Letty (loosely based on Pym) comes to the library to read books: sometimes novels, but more often biographies.

  Tea is no longer a ritual, a ceremony of teapots and the choice between China or Indian, but a source of companionship and comfort to be mutually enjoyed by friends. The office workers plug in an electric kettle and use teabags. Coffee is instant from an oversized tin, shared to save money. The conversation is stilted
, uninspiring; the only thing they have in common, says Norman, is the likelihood of dying of hypothermia.

  Pym poured many of her feelings about her breast cancer into the character of Marcia. Though Pym joked about her false breast, some of her deeper feelings are expressed in Marcia’s grief about her disfigurement: ‘She was not a whole woman; some vital part of her had been taken away.’[2] As Pym did, Marcia has a crush on her consultant surgeon, ‘the man who had cut her up’. She discovers where he lives and stalks his home.

  Edwin, obsessed with Anglo-Catholicism, longs for the old world of ‘cloak and biretta’ but now the priests have long hair, wear jeans and play guitars. He is doubtful about the ‘Kiss of Peace’. Letty longs for love and companionship, but somehow always fails to ‘connect’. In the underground station, a woman is slumped on a seat (is she drunk? drugged?) and Letty is again immobilised by her detachment. A student is the only person brave enough to help the woman, only to be rewarded by a coarse expletive: ‘Fuck Off!’ Norman is a racist, troubled by the sexy energy of the young beautiful black women who work in his office. He likes to bite off the heads of the black ‘jelly babies’ he keeps in a bag in the office, telling himself that he’s not a racist, he just likes the liquorice flavour.

  Marcia is one of the lonely people who ‘fall through the net’ of the welfare state. Without a community of family and close friends, and with a stubborn desire to be left alone, she is vulnerable. Pym’s notebook contains references to those who ‘fall through the net … Hair net …’. Pym was a fan of the Beatles and one cannot help but think here of Eleanor Rigby, ‘wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door’ and the haunting refrain: ‘All the lonely people’. But there is also the unmistakable influence of Philip Larkin and his ‘Mr Bleaney’. Pym explicitly acknowledged Larkin in a reference to his bleak poem ‘Ambulances’ towards the chilling finale of her book, when Marcia, now an emaciated, anorectic old woman, is taken to hospital to die alone. There is a glimmer of hope at the end of the novel, but it is merely a glimmer. Letty, glancing at the London pigeons picking insects off other pigeons, reflects: ‘Perhaps this is all we as human beings can do for each other.’[3]

  CHAPTER IV

  Miss Pym attends the Booker Prize

  Pym was amused that several readers wrote to her to say that they were delighted to discover that she was not dead. The reviews of Quartet in Autumn were enthusiastic. Paul Bailey of the Observer remarked on the return (after sixteen years) of ‘a considerable stylist, whose quietly accomplished work has been shamefully neglected … small in scale, Quartet in Autumn is on its own terms an exquisite, even magnificent work of art’. Some of the reviewers observed the sad, darker undertones of the novel in comparison with Pym’s other work, ‘an unmistakable touch of frost where earlier there had been sunshine’. Most believed it to be among her finest, most sophisticated work. Jilly Cooper, an ardent fan of the early novels (she described them as Jane Austen let loose in Cranford), noted: ‘The comedy is bleaker … but the compassion for human vanities and the gift for the unexpected are still undiminished.’ Fellow novelist Beryl Bainbridge described the book as: ‘A beautifully sparse account of four elderly people … funny and sad.’[1]

  Privately, Bob Smith also focused on its darker tone: ‘The effect is rather frightening, despite the relief provided by acute observation of amusing trivia … I think that in one sense – perhaps the most important one – it is your best book and yet I don’t look forward to rereading it, whereas I reread your others all the time.’[2] Jock Liddell agreed that it was her greatest book to date. Quartet in Autumn also brought her to the attention of America. Publisher’s Weekly raved that American critics and readers would find Pym ‘pure gold’, going on to say, ‘though the harmony is in a minor key, the melody is one of beauty, dignity and spirit as these voices, unnoticed by the world, sing on’. The Chicago Tribune described the book as ‘a small masterpiece’.[3]

  Daryll Forde’s widow wrote to Pym saying that the novel brought tears to her eyes. She was a doctor and was deeply moved by the portrayal of Marcia and Dr Strong: ‘so accurate and sympathetic’. She was only sorry that her husband was not alive to see her success. Peggy Makins, agony aunt for Woman magazine and a perceptive critic of Pym, found the book unbearably sad: ‘I have the greatest respect for it. It is remarkable and chilling and horribly true … I doubt if it could ever be likeable … it has grim humour, but the loneliness, the withdrawing into one’s self, the acute sense of despair – these were an aspect of your insight, which made me, at 62, feel the cold of death.’[4] Pym also received a letter from the editor of the Church Times, which said that although he did not usually review novels, he would make an exception as Pym had given many free commercials for the newspaper.

  Pym duly noted the comments about the ‘darker’ aspects, but remained cheerful about her own declining years, ‘being blessed with an optimistic temperament and realising that there is nothing you can do about it’. She was already thinking ahead to the publication of The Sweet Dove Died: ‘It is totally different from Quartet and there are no clergy in it, so goodness knows what people will think of it. Yet it is a chunk of my life, in a sense!’[5]

  There was more fun in October, Pym meeting up with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley at Paul Binding’s cottage. Iris was charming: ‘nice face and pleasant to talk to’. Bayley, ‘knowing what he feels about my books made him even nicer to talk to’. He dropped his wine glass, ‘which seemed to go off with a loud explosion and there we were all scrabbling on the floor picking up bits of glass’. Then she went to lunch with Henry Harvey at his cottage in Willersey: ‘Beautiful day and drive.’[6]

  The next day, Pym was telephoned by James Wright, who told her the wonderful news that she had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She certainly did not expect to win, but she told Larkin that she was delighted to be attending ‘a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to mingle in the Literary World, perhaps even to catch a glimpse of Maschler!’[7]

  On 23 November, Pym was driven with her editors to Claridge’s ballroom, finding it ‘very spacious inside, white and gold and a roaring coal fire in a sort of hall’. She described her appearance as: ‘BP in her 65th year. Tall, short hair, long black pleated skirt, black blouse, Indian with painted flowers (C&A £4.90) and green beads.’ She sipped a gin and tonic, whilst being introduced to a group of people, including none other than Tom Maschler. Philip Larkin gave a speech in which he announced that the judges were looking for three aspects: ‘Could I read it? Did I believe it? Did it move me?’[8] He then announced that there were two near-misses, Caroline Blackwood and Barbara Pym. Paul Scott was the winner, for his elegiac post-Raj novel Staying On, though he was ill and unable to attend the ceremony. Each of the nominees were given a special leather-bound copy of their book.

  Pym did not express disappointment for not winning, she had had a ‘marvellous evening’. She told Larkin that she was ‘so happy just to be in print again that nothing else matters’. And, as always, she gave thanks to the man who had done so much to restore her name and reputation: ‘thanks … from the most overestimated novelist of 1977’.[9]

  The Booker shortlisting led to accolades from all quarters. Foreign rights were snapped up not only in America, where she was beginning to build a loyal following, but also in Sweden: ‘I think it might appeal to the Scandinavians.’ The press couldn’t get enough of Pym and her ‘out of the wilderness to success’ story. She was invited to do a BBC radio talk for Finding a Voice and The Times asked her to write an article on anything she liked (she chose the subject of ‘a Defence of the Novel’). One satisfying result of her fame was that Tom Maschler was finally treating her with the utmost respect. Not one to hold a grudge, they began writing to one another. She told Philip Larkin that they were now ‘Dear Tom, Dear Barbara’.[10]

  An American university wanted to buy Pym’s papers. Larkin strongly disapproved of selling them abroad and advised her to try for the Bodleian in her beloved Oxford. Pym told hi
m that she valued her notebooks above all, which she had kept since 1948: ‘a kind of diary, not only of events and emotions but also of bits and ideas for novels. These I could not let go, while still alive.’[11]

  BBC’s Woman’s Hour was adapting Quartet: ‘Rather unsuitable, I would have thought, but a lot depends on the adaptation.’ In the meantime, she began writing a new novel, set in a country village. She told Larkin that money did not motivate her at all and she had decided not to sell her manuscripts to America: ‘But the main thing is to feel that I am now regarded as a novelist, a good feeling after all those years of “This is well written, but …”’[12]

  Then, the very next day after the Booker evening at Claridge’s, she had a ‘nasty turn’ and collapsed on the way to lunch with Hilary. She was rushed to hospital, where there were fears she had suffered another stroke, or a heart attack. Later, she was told that she could have a pacemaker fitted, noting that her doctor advised that it ‘must be removed at death as it is liable to explode in the crematorium’.[13] He said that she could use this information in a book.

  Her symptoms seemed to subside, just in time for the publication of The Sweet Dove Died. ‘Marvellous press’, she noted with delight; ‘Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Financial Times’.[14] It was, perhaps, her most highly acclaimed novel. On the night of publication she and Hilary drank cava. Then came another great accolade: she was invited to appear on BBC Radio 4’s flagship programme Desert Island Discs.

  CHAPTER V

  In which Miss Pym is invited as a Castaway on a famous Desert Island