by Barbara Pym
‘And some of us feel even more the need for English novels to read,’ said the gaunt woman.…
But now you see my imagination has run away with me, and I think how nice it would have been if I had made that remark about worship. Does one ever make consciously Compton-Burnett remarks in situations where they would be most fruitful I wonder? I must have the courage to try some day.
Supper has been brought in and I am waiting for dear Friedbert to come; it is all so domesticated. I feel I should say ‘The Master has to go to Pirna today – he will not be here for lunch.’ And then in he comes – the hasty husbandly kiss…
Auf wiedersehen – whenever that may be. Won’t it be odd seeing Henry married. I only hope I may not find it too odd or not enough odd. I feel there should be a happy medium. Still, Hope springs eternal…
Best love to you – Barbara
To Elsie Harvey in Oxford
Oswestry.
20 July 1938
Darling sister Elsie!
I shall just be able to start a letter to you before I have to go out into the town to meet my sister Hilary, but I have only about ten minutes and it is known that one cannot say much in ten minutes. Still, it is something to have started this letter, do you not think it is something?
Yesterday we went to Liverpool to do some shopping. My mother has given me a fur coat to go to Poland, and I bought it yesterday. It is a golden brown musquash, quite long – I had only a little short one before. Hilary helped me to choose it. I tried on several, and it was a marvellously hot day, so that I was wondering if the coat would perhaps be too hot! But as my dear sister told me, the Poles are hot but their country is cold. I have had my passport back from Dr Alberg, with a Polish visa etc. It looks lovely, and I don’t understand a word of it. He also sent me some books and pamphlets about Poland, so I shall be able to learn something about it.
I had a postcard yesterday from a friend of mine Mary Sharp (Henry will remember her). She was married a few hours after she landed in America and is now on her honeymoon round Lake Michigan. She sent me a picture of a romantic lake and forest. Oh, said Barbara, in a quiet full tone, I do not grudge happiness to other people, although it is something I want for myself. It is known that every woman wants the love of a husband, but it is also known that some women have to be content with other kinds of love. Now, Barbara, I do not quite see your meaning. I do not see what you mean by ‘other kinds of love’. I hope you do not mean anything disgraceful. I very much hope it. Disgraceful? said Barbara, in a high nervous voice. Why should I mean anything disgraceful? One is usually silent about disgraceful things. No, indeed, she added, her voice taking on a fuller, rounded tone, I was meaning the love of a dear sister, simply that.
I expect your dear husband is busy with his examination papers, but I hope he has not been reading Pilgrim’s Progress aloud to you. Give him my love. I am sending a great deal of love to Oxford, so you must divide it up into suitable portions.
Barbara Pymska Fredericovna
To Henry and Elsie Harvey in Oswestry.
Helsingfors
30 September 1938
Dearest Elsie and Henry!
What will you think of me for not having written to you for so many months? Actually I don’t suppose you will have thought of anything, as I imagine you must have been through the same anxiety in Finland as we have here in England. And now here we are with seven gas masks in the house and Mr Chamberlain is safely back in England and thanks to him there isn’t going to be any war. Although one hardly dares to believe it after all the worry of the last few days. I’ve wondered so much where you were and what you were feeling because being here I’m so cut off from all my friends who seem to be all over the world at the present moment. But it was marvellous to be back in England after Poland, where everyone was so terrified. I left Katowice on the 16th – a fortnight ago to be exact – when it was still pretty easy to come through Germany. I suppose I should have had to go eventually if I hadn’t left of my own accord.
My departure was in many ways quite dramatic. I left with Dr Alberg and the chauffeur at 8 o’clock in the morning. Mrs Alberg took a bunch of gladioli out of a vase and handed them to me as a last gesture and I was given enough food to feed myself and numerous Germans all through Germany and still have a lot to bring home here. So the fine Polish sausage was much enjoyed by our gardener. Dr Alberg was so nervous all the way to Beuthen – the German frontier station from which I was to catch my train – he told me not to speak at all at the frontier but just to show my passport and money, and not to speak to a soul in Germany. That was rather difficult as I had an eight hour journey from Beuthen to Berlin – and then the night journey Berlin – Hanover – Aachen – about another ten hours. And by the time I’d got out of Poland I wasn’t nervous any more, because of course Germany seemed just as usual. Naturally they knew very little about the crisis and I talked to many people and everyone was very kind to me. I had time in Berlin to see Unter den Linden and to walk in the Wilhelmstrasse, and to feel rather disappointed that it didn’t show signs of feverish activity. It was so dark and silent. I suppose everyone was having dinner. I had a splitting headache, having to deal with half my luggage being lost and some to be registered to England, all alone. But no, I wasn’t quite in tears on the Friedrichstrasse station. I just sat smoking a gold tipped Polish cigarette, feeling as I used to feel when I came back from Oxford and sat waiting on Snowhill station Birmingham, that my whole life seems to be spent sitting on stations all over Europe leaving behind the people I love. Well, Barbara, love is a strong word and now you will be thinking that I fell in love with somebody in Poland and you will be ready at once to be unkind about it (not Elsie!) and say that I had better not be putting any Silesian episodes into my novels. But don’t be afraid – if I ever do write another novel – and I intend to when I feel a little calmer in my mind – it will be in the style of my first one.
I can hardly expect you to believe that I ever went to Poland as I didn’t even send you a postcard of Katowice, but Jock and Barnicot both had letters from me so you can ask them. It was a curious life and the few weeks I had of it have made me just like I was before only more so. The family were extremely kind to me but I was agonisingly lonely, though latterly I became friendly with the British consul and he was a great comfort to me.
I am going to London some time next week and hope to get Something To Do. But what? My five talents are really so very special, aren’t they, and that must always be my consolation. Do I seem very bitter in this letter, by the way? You know I am not really like that. I shall like being in London – Hilary is there too, doing a secretarial course.
This isn’t a very exciting letter but it is full of affection and yearnings to see you, which I know can’t be satisfied for months. Now do you see why I am so mournfully pathetic about my friends being all so far away? The obvious remedy is to make new ones as everyone else seems to be doing, even at our time of life.
I feel I ought to have told you more about Poland – the smuts on one’s face, the bright pink soup, the barefooted peasants, the artistic pattern of the factories on a wet Sunday afternoon, the impossible but beautiful language and all that. But I will write again. And do please write to me – both of you. With best love –
Pymska. Barbara Fredericovna.
To Elsie Harvey in Helsingfors
27 Upper Berkeley Street,
Portman Square,
London W.I.
31 October 1938
Darling Sister Elsie:
As you see by my address I am at present living in London. Hilary and I are in rooms together – she is doing a secretarial course and I am writing a new novel. It is such a pleasant life – I don’t think I’ve been so happy since I was a young girl of eighteen in my first year at Oxford! I work very hard and have done about a quarter of this new novel. It is such a nice change being in London and our rooms are very comfortable and near everywhere – just by Marble Arch and H
yde Park. Jock asks why I loiter sadly in Upper Berkeley Street instead of returning to Poland. I might ask him why he stays in Greece instead of returning to England to be a comfort to his brother and to me. In any case the Polish family don’t want me to go back even if I wanted to. It was terribly lonely there and I had no time to write, and I honestly don’t believe I can be happy unless I am writing. It seems to be the only thing I really want to do. My parents also want me in England – my mother was terribly anxious about me, even before the Crisis started properly. So you see I have given all manner of excuses and reasons for staying in London. And of course the main one is that I’m happy here, and isn’t that enough? Have we a right to be happy, or is it only a rare thing, so that we should be glad if we are happy for a few days in every year? We have no rights, said Barbara, in a dull, flat voice.
I have met Jonathan Cape, Jockie’s publisher. He also nearly published my first novel, and spoke quite well of my second. I wondered if it was possible to get a job with a publisher and so I wrote to him and went to see him. Actually it seems impossible to get anything like that, but he was awfully nice to me and said he had liked my novels, and hoped I would go on writing. He asked Hilary and me to a cocktail party at his flat, which we enjoyed very much. He is a charming man and so amusing.
I heard from Jock last week. He doesn’t seem to be coming home yet. I have been hoping he would as I haven’t seen him since the end of February. Has he told you that his first novel Kind Relations is to be published? Actually Jonathan Cape told me, and then Jock said so in his letter. He seems to be meeting a lot of very odd people, but as he is thirty I suppose he can look after himself. It amuses me so much, though, to read the kind of letters he writes now and to remember how annoyed he used to be with me when I wrote like that. I wonder if I shall find him much changed – if I ever see him again. Somehow I cannot call him Robert. I am getting old you know and I am set in my habits and he has been my friend since I was twenty. You would not expect an old woman to change her ways, would you? I think you would be shocked if I were suddenly to marry, for instance. But there seems to be no chance of that.
Fancy that we should have nearly met in Germany – I am so sad now about it and Czechoslovakia and Poland and everywhere in central Europe that I can’t think of going there again at present. There seems to be nothing but cruelty and misery in the world sometimes. This ‘stand up to them and fight’ attitude sounds very fine but I am sure the people who profess it don’t stop for a moment to think what a war really means. You’d think that Spain and China would show everyone, but they don’t seem to.
This doesn’t seem to be a very amusing letter (all the amusing things I think of have to be saved for the novel, so my letters are all very dull!), now that I look back on it, but I hope you don’t mind. At least, 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 is all good experience, anyway, and while I’m doing it I’m perfectly happy.
See how serious and philosophical I am! But it is marvellous being with Hilary after being so alone in Poland, and we have the most wonderful jokes about everything. I don’t know what Henry will think about me, probably he will think nothing.
Very much love to you from Barbara
1939
London W.I
21 February 1939
My dearest sister Elsie:
I have been working hard at my novel. It is nearly finished now, but I shall then have to go over it and make some improvements before I am really satisfied with it. When you start to write one you always wonder if you will be able to make it long enough, but by the time you get to the end it is always too long – I love cutting out bits and crossing out whole pages.
The best piece of news from London is that spring has come. Has it come to you yet? It started here on February 5th, a Sunday. There was that absolutely unmistakable feeling in the air that sends people mad, particularly old spinsters like your sister Pym who is already rather queer in the head. But now that she is twenty-five she has reached years of discretion and does not do the things she would have done when she was nineteen. And London is so different from Oxford anyway. One behaves much more soberly. But the weather has been lovely – we have had a lot of sunshine, especially today, and for months past the streets have been full of flowers. Now they are selling daffodils, narcissi, tulips, blue irises and of course lots of mimosa. Somehow I always think of my sister Elsie when I see mimosa! I will send you a piece in this letter, although I expect that you do have such flowers in Finland too, just as you have deep armchairs. But I hope you will agree that it is the thought that matters, even though the flower will be all dry and squashed and fall on the fine carpet so that Mr Harvey will be angry.
I was so touched at the picture of him decorating a Christmas tree with his own hands – things like that make me want to cry.
We went to two Surrealist Exhibitions last week – one of pictures – paintings and drawings – by Man Ray which I didn’t understand or like very much, though he does wonderful photographs. The other – Wolfgang Paalen – was more interesting. The first object that met our eyes as we opened the door into the gallery was an umbrella covered entirely in sponges! Your practical sister’s first thought was oh, what a waste to cut up all those sponges, when they are so expensive too. There were also some curious leather objects made of a sort of grey suede. There was something very unpleasant about them, I think because one expected them to be in stone or some hard material and of course they were quite soft. He had done some quite nice paintings, very dreamy and fine like the skeletons of leaves or birds. These exhibitions are very amusing, although I can’t say whether they are really good. I think they can hardly be, as so many of me things one could do oneself! But didn’t somebody say I was a genius? I think it was a very long time ago, in the old Imperial Russia before the war, or in Oxford in the days of Jowett when one played croquet on the lawn with bearded undergraduates, Henry Stanley Harvey and Patrick Marsden Wall perhaps!
But you see I am raving. Perhaps it is because I am hungry. I have two beautiful cakes and a fine box of homemade sweets from my aunt, but I want meat, red meat. You see, it is about seven o’clock in the evening and so it is really a natural appetite I am feeling. Perhaps I will eat an orange when I have finished this letter. It is known that oranges are very good for the health, and I have two fine large ones on my mantelpiece.
I hope Herr Lektor Harvey is well. I had a spare Valentine and very nearly sent it to him, but then I decided it would be more prudent to send it to young Mr Michael Benthall, who has asked us to sherry in his dear little flat. He is twenty years old. Jock thought I was in love with him, but although he can divine all the secrets of the human heart he made a mistake and now of course there are really no secrets in my heart.
Now please write and get Henry to if such a thing can be possible. I long for news of you.
With much love to you –
Barbara Frederickovna
To Henry and Elsie Harvey in Helsingfors
London W.I.
11 May 1939
Dearest Elsie and Henry!
I hope you are both well and that you will soon be coming to England. I shall be terribly disappointed if you don’t! I am imagining that Jock will be coming back too and we can all be dear brothers and sisters together, except that some will be husbands and wives, which is an even more satisfactory relationship.
Now I am back in London, in my minute little room at the top of a lodging house in a quite good district of London – conveniently near all the shops and art galleries and Mayfair – though why I should want to be near there you may well ask. Hilary has just got a job on the secretarial staff of the B.B. C. and she is very pleased about it. It will last till September and if she is good enough she will be able to get on the permanent staff. I think we may get a little flat in the autumn as it would rea
lly be more convenient than rooms. We can’t cook anything here and there isn’t much space to put things. But we are very happy and the people in the house are nice and we are near Marble Arch and Hyde Park and Oxford Street (and the Edgware Road which is not a very nice district for two young women to wander about in late at night). (I have rather a fancy to live in Kensington, but don’t know if Hilary would agree.)
Today I had lunch with the wife of the British vice-consul in Katowice – the place in Poland where I was teaching English. Things seem to be about as bad as they can be there – she and the children have come back to England and see no prospect of returning to Poland yet, and the Embassy and Consulate in Warsaw have sent all their women and children home. So if I had gone out again I should have had to come back a second time probably! As you know, we now have conscription for men of 20 – 21 which may make things a little better. If there is going to be a war – and we can’t be sure that there won’t be one – we may as well be prepared for it. I don’t know what Jock would say to these views, if he is still a Pacifist, but with the world in the state it is now, it seems to be no more than common sense. But yet the whole thing is such a farce, everyone spending millions to get ready for a War that nobody really wants! I am going to get a First Aid certificate which ought to be quite useful even if there isn’t a war – I am going to classes every week. Fancy me learning how to make splints and bandages! I rather look forward to it. I made some boxes for gas masks when I was at home – it is rather a pleasant sensation to fool oneself into thinking that one is doing useful work!
Apart from all this I have been working very hard at a new novel which I finished before Easter. I am now making some alterations in it though, so heaven knows when it will be ready to go round the publishers. It is really quite a nice novel in its way but needs to be made more exciting. ‘Be more wicked, if necessary,’ says my agent [Ralph Pinter], who is very kind and helpful. 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?