A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym

by Barbara Pym

  I came out of the WRNS on January 11th and am on my two months resettlement leave (paid!) at the moment. I am going to start looking for a job in a week or two. Heaven knows what I shall get, but I must earn some money. In many ways I would like to go abroad but having just got nicely settled in a flat I want to enjoy it for a while anyway. We do quite a lot of entertaining in a mild way – hardly any drink and mostly foreign dishes like moussaka and ravioli, owing to the scarcity of meat! I have become quite an efficient and resourceful cook and enjoy the domestic side of it very much.

  20 February

  I am really ashamed not to have finished this letter before now. I have just returned from Oswestry where I found my father very well and the country looking very pleasant, catkins, snowdrops and crocuses, even early primroses and buds on the lilac. I brought my typewriter back with me, so shall be able to get on with some writing. I have done a lot of alterations to Some Tame Gazelle and may try it again, after an interval of about eight years it may be more acceptable! There is so much that I want to write now, that I hardly know where to begin. But I feel I must also have a job, not only because of earning money but because I find routine work soothing (as long as it isn’t too boring) and the best way of keeping out that Angst, from which we all suffer in some degree nowadays. Though creative work is better still.

  If you haven’t read Cyril Connolly’s book The Unquiet Grave, you will wonder what I am talking about and say it is just one of my silly German words, but as I expect you have read it you will see that I am keeping up to date with all our clever young men. Not that he is young exactly – he is approaching forty, indeed, probably is forty now, is fat and given to self-pity and nostalgia. But he is clever and puts his finger on what it is we suffer from now – though maybe you don’t in the bracing air of Sweden. He is ‘soaked in French Literature’ – not my expression, but the kind of thing one would like to be!

  I have no very recent news of Jock, but wrote him a long letter some weeks ago. He says he has read all of Shakespeare and all of Proust, since being back in Alexandria. I wish I could say the same. He is certainly more rewarding to write to than you are but perhaps you are more deserving. I have kept some of your early letters, though I destroyed most of the James Joyce-like ones which I never understood anyway. It is pleasant to feel that you and Jock will never go quite out of my life now – who would ever have thought it. I see that Craster has retired and is to write a history of the Library. I hope it may appear in my lifetime. I could give him plenty of material from the human point of view.

  With love to you both,

  Barbara

  108 Cambridge Street

  5 June 1946

  My Dear Henry,

  I have so much news that I had better just fling it at you in Compton-Burnett style. Hilary and her husband have separated and my father has married again and given us a very nice stepmother of suitable age and a dear brother and sister, whom I have not met. He is so happy and it is a great relief to us to think he has somebody to look after him. It was all a great surprise I might add! Life seemed to be whirling too fast for us!

  Hilary is happier without her husband – who was nice but much too cold and intellectual and logical to live with. They were not really madly in love when they married but it seemed a good thing, and of course lots of marriages of that kind turn out very well. But personally I would prefer the other thing, even if it wore off, as I am told it does. Maybe I shall be able to keep my illusions as it doesn’t look as if I shall ever get married.

  I am turning into an anthropologist as I now have a job at the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, which I like very much. I work for dear Professor Daryll Forde, who is brilliant, has great charm but no manners, and is altogether the kind of person I ought to work for! I never seem to have time to do much writing – I begin to wonder whether I shall ever again send a novel to a publisher – I ought to have been doing that rather than writing to you.

  Lots of love to you both –

  Barbara

  Part III

  THE NOVELIST

  The Published Novelist

  In 1946 Barbara started to work with Daryll Forde, Professor of Anthropology at University College, London, and Director of the International African Institute. He was a brilliant, often impatient and difficult man, but with great energy, efficiency and enthusiasm, who had, immediately after the war, revitalised the Institute, founded in 1926 by Lord Lugard for the study of African languages and culture.

  Barbara was his Assistant Editor on the Institute’s journal Africa and on the series of Ethnographic and Linguistic Surveys of Africa. She also helped to edit volumes of Seminar papers and prepared for press the various monographs published by the Institute. She was a capable and conscientious editor but had no real interest in Africa as such, being far more fascinated by the anthropologists and the linguists than by the subjects they were studying.

  She created a comic world around them, embroidering the few facts she knew about the various authors and reviewers into a splendid fantasy so that it was often difficult to remember what was real and what was not. (‘I couldn’t ask W. if his Mother was better because I couldn’t remember if we’d invented her.’) She was quick to pick out the ridiculous phrase (anthropological and, especially, linguistic studies are very rich in these) thereby making what would have been a tedious task of proof-reading or editing a constant delight to those who worked with her.

  Giddiness continually hurls my goat to the ground.

  The hyenas have broken the beer strainers of the women.

  Travel with a bicycle in the rainy season is not easy.

  No personal diaries other than the briefest entries exist for the years 1946-8. This can most easily be explained by the changed circumstances of her life at this time: the illness and death of her mother in September 1945 which led to more domestic responsibility; the end of the war and demobilisation; the remarriage of her father in 1946; and the completely new experience, for her, of starting a full-time job in London which must have taken a great deal of her concentration. When she did feel able to turn her mind to something else, it was to the revision of her novel Some Tame Gazelle.

  In 1949 Jonathan Cape accepted Some Tame Gazelle, now revised for the third time. It was published in 1950 and had a general critical success. ‘Delightfully amusing,’ wrote one critic in The Guardian, ‘but no more to be described than a delicious taste or smell.’ Between 1950 and 1961 six of her novels were published by Cape: Some Tame Gazelle, 1950; Excellent Women, 1952; Jane and Prudence, 1953; Less Than Angels, 1955; A Glass of Blessings, 1958; and No Fond Return of Love, 1961. They were praised by the critics, enjoyed a modest financial success and delighted an ever-growing circle of admirers and enthusiasts. Excellent Women, the most generally popular, was a Book Society Choice and was subsequently serialised in the BBC’s Woman’s Hour.

  In February 1950 her only broadcast radio play, Something to Remember, was produced by Hugh Stewart, with Grizelda Hervey playing the archetypal Pym heroine Edith Gossett.

  Barbara always said that she was glad that she could never be a ‘full-time novelist’ and that she had to earn her living some other way. It was fortunate that she was able to do so in a world as rich in comic material as the I. A.I. Because the Institute was classed as a charity, salaries were very low indeed and Barbara was lucky that she was able to share a home with Hilary, separated from her husband in 1946 and now a BBC producer. Since 1946 they had lived together in great amity (as they did for the rest of her life), thus making the fictional situation of Some Tame Gazelle, projected all those years ago, come true. They lived first in a flat in Pimlico (the setting for Excellent Women) and then in Barnes (the suburb in Less Than Angels and No Fond Return of Love).

  From 1948 Barbara had kept notebooks – partly diaries, partly ideas for novels, or simply observations. At the back of each one are detailed shopping lists that may one day provide invaluable source material for social hi
storians. These 82 small, spiral-backed books form the heart of this section. Such was her dedicated professionalism that even in the 17 years when her novels were not published, even when it seemed unlikely that she would ever be published again, she still made notes for novels and recorded observations. In a way these notebooks were her most precious possession, the real raw material of her writing.

  In 1961 Hilary bought a small house in Queens Park (the district described in An Unsuitable Attachment). There they had a garden and were able to keep cats. Tatiana, the original of Faustina, a beautiful but highly neurotic tortoiseshell, had a short, tragic life, but Tom Boilkin (sleek, black and white, President of the Young Neuters Club) and Minerva (also known as Nana, another, more amiable tortoiseshell whose preferred diet was fried tomato skins and custard) lived long and happy lives. H.H.

  1948-1963

  1948. Mission meeting. Prayers are difficult when choir practice interrupts them – the organist making jokes. We pray for streets. ‘Warwick Square’, says the vicar, his tone seeming to gain in fullness.

  In the vestry I look round with frank interest – two rows of chairs, a grand piano. An assortment of vases and bowls, a small brass crucifix in need of cleaning, rolls of Mission posters.

  The conversation – the bishop’s letter is feeble, a pity says the vicar. People are so indifferent. Somebody suggests a procession, but people from the pubs might join in.

  Worshipping in a Victorian church (St Gabriel’s, Warwick Square) – no nice monuments round the walls, but the brass tablets and the atmosphere of Victorian piety is in its way just as comforting.

  The new vicar calling – saying a prayer with housewives in their aprons – or the fear that he might.

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

  Whitsun 1949. Bristol revisited. Coffee at Lloyd’s (Carwardines). The comfortable atmosphere of a provincial town. It is this which evokes nostalgia rather than any memories.

  Clifton on a June evening. Light on the Regency houses. Wistaria dying, poppies. But it hadn’t been like this during the war. Those twinkling lights everywhere and the door of The Rocks standing wide open and welcoming, light glowing in a moonlike globe. Then it had been a blue-shaded light inside the door hastily shut and weeping in the Ladies. And when we looked over the Suspension Bridge it was not into lights but the dark bowl of trees.

  The angry, umbraged and hurt postcards coming from the Oxford anthropologists: ‘There seems to be no indication that I should get a copy’.

  It is the only occasion when one really wants a husband – in a pub with uncongenial company and the feeling of not belonging.

  St Michael’s Church, Minehead. Morning. Women are doing the flowers – huge dahlias. It smells of floor polish rather than incense.

  Old screen and font with stone figures (one partially restored?) The suspicious church-crawler looking out, not for the genuinely old, but the restored.

  Sunday 27 November. Tea at the Hope-Wallaces to meet Elizabeth Bowen. Present: EB and her husband Alan Cameron, Jacqueline Hope-Wallace, Philip H-W, Veronica Wedgwood, John Hope (young), old man with white beard, David King-Wood, Hilary and myself. Charming drawing room in little St John’s Wood house, first floor. Coral red curtains and turquoise walls – small Victorian chairs and ‘objects’ – but nothing new or Vogueish – a kind of cosy shabbiness. Elizabeth Bowen is in black with grey and black pearls and pretty ear-rings (little diamond balls). The young author in her nervousness talks rather too much about herself! EB discusses methods of working – better at a typewriter than curled up in an armchair. She is very kind and obviously feels she ought to know more about me than she can possibly know! Her stammer is not really as bad as I had expected. Veronica tells me that both Daniel George and William Plomer were in agreement over Some Tame Gazelle (apparently unusual) and think it very amusing.

  Veronica had a relative who ‘passed over’. She was heard at a seance, saying in an unmistakable voice that she was ‘bitterly disappointed’.

  Buying Christmas cards in Mowbrays – one feels one can’t push.

  The way one betrays one’s old loves – getting the new one to read Trivia or Matthew Arnold, going to the same churchyard. When we are older there seems no new approach left. The disillusionment of finding out that something (say Trivia) has been his thing with someone else.

  January 1950. Broomhall Lodge [staying with friends]. The distinction between animals’ and humans’ dishes is a very narrow one. One feels that when we aren’t there, there is no distinction.

  Fasting before midnight mass. ‘Fr X told us to fast for 2 hours.’ ‘Oh but Fr Y told us 3 hours.’ ‘I only had a very light meal myself, just a boiled egg and some tea and I did eat a little fruit, but it was over by 7.45 at the latest, so really I was fasting for 4 1/4 hours.’

  To Henry Harvey in Göttingen

  47 Nassau Road

  Barnes S.W.13

  1 May 1950

  Dear Henry,

  Here is a copy of my book [Some Tame Gazelle] – published today – with the author’s compliments. I don’t know if it will amuse you but hope that perhaps it may. Please don’t notice all the places where I ought to have put commas – I am only too conscious of my shortcomings. There haven’t been any reviews yet. It doesn’t seem fair that people should have the power to criticise it!

  I haven’t put any embarrassing inscription, so you can give it to somebody as a birthday present. I should never know.

  Hope you are well,

  With love – Barbara

  Gordon Glover/Fabian. A Gordonish character in the village. His wife, to whom he had been consistently unfaithful, died – his outraged surprise and confusion of sentimental symbols.

  ‘The Chapel Minister has BSc after his name – I feel one gets really everything there.’

  1951. It seems rather dangerous, after we have been praying for the unity of the churches, to have a hymn by Newman.

  1 February 1952. King George VI’s Lying in State. 7.30-8.30 a.m. Very cold. The hall very dim, footsteps muffled on the thick carpet. The still figures guarding the catafalque – the nose and chin of the very young officer of the Household Cavalry so pink and smooth – eyes hidden. The faces of the Yeomen of the Guard – carved out of wood, lined and pale, one with a small moustache. The glitter of the diamonds in the crown and the white flowers on the coffin.

  The vicar in the dark vicarage with a broken window, near to the yew-shaded churchyard. Lives with his mother – house said to be very dirty. Vicar has to be roused from his bed (? by an excellent woman) to take Communion Service.

  Read some of Jane Austen’s last chapters and find out how she manages all the loose ends.

  The Riviera Cafe, St Austell is decorated in shades of chocolate brown. Very tasteless, as are the cakes.

  To Henry Harvey in Oxford

  47 Nassau Road

  27 March 1952

  Dear Henry,

  Many thanks for your letter. There is something irresistible about your finding an old letter of mine in a drawer and answering it! You mustn’t mind if I use the incident in a story one day. No, it didn’t really need an answer – it was rather a peevish letter as far as I remember. We were both young and stupid in those days [at Oxford] and I can see that I must have been just as trying in my way as you were. Goodness knows what I expected! Anyway, you can be quite sure that I don’t bear you any ill will about anything. I even look back on those days with a certain amount of pleasure – or do I mean emotion recollected in tranquillity, ‘Samson Agonistes’ and Langbaine and Jock being there and our quarrel – some excursions into the country.

  Now we can have the satisfaction of being mean to each other – I by not giving you a copy of my new novel [Excellent Women] and you by not buying it. I wonder if you’d like it, anyway? I suppose every man I have ever known will see
himself as Rocky (the rather shallow character). Doesn’t the British Council buy books?

  You don’t say where you are living in Oxford, so I just imagine you in an office with a lot of filing cabinets and telephones. (Where would they file this letter if they did open it?)

  I am glad you are going to be able to marry Susi [Henry and Elsie were divorced] now. I should think she has been very good for you and I do wish you both every happiness. Perhaps we shall meet one day – I should think it is inevitable and I shall have much pleasure in buying the young people a drink.

  With best wishes,

  Yours – Barbara

  9 June. London Jazz Club. This is all very proper and formal, there is a kind of controlled enthusiasm. Unselfconscious. Pepsicola and cups of tea and a grey-haired woman collecting the empty cups. It is as respectable as a church youth club. No clergyman there, but a grey-haired man watching the dancers and holding his daughter’s handbag and cardigan – for he is the prospective father-in-law (we thought) of one of the young men in the band.

  The agony of wondering if he will send a Christmas card! And he, wandering in his provincial town on Christmas Eve, as we used to do in Oswestry.

  The Hadzapi will eat practically anything that is edible except the hyena.

  The giving and receiving of off-prints brings about a special relationship between people.

  1953. The young woman has just read a novel by Rosamond Lehmann about the suffering of women in love – it makes her feel inferior as if she isn’t capable of suffering so much. Perhaps when I’m older, she thinks hopefully.

  ‘Gone to Watford to talk about the lineage system,’ she said desperately. ‘It seems so, well, so unnecessary.’

  Gems from Crockford:

  de Blogue (formerly Blogg), Oswald, Wm. Chas.