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

by Barbara Pym

The organist of Bristol Cathedral is called A. Surplice Esq.

  24 June. Men don’t seem to like women in black – does it foreshadow their own death? Or do they think of Masha in The Seagull ‘in mourning for her life’ and fear that a long, dreary tale of an unsuccessful love is about to be unfolded?

  Her eyes seemed to beg for a future meeting, but somehow he couldn’t suggest one. Instead he asked ‘Are you any good at typing?’

  Professor Mainwaring had taught his students always to make carbon copies, use inverted commas round certain technical terms and, best of all, that thanks can never be too fulsome.

  ‘It is important that not even the slightest expression of amusement or disapproval should ever be displayed at the description of ridiculous, impossible or disgusting features in custom, cult or legend.’ Notes & Queries in Anthropology.

  Reading a biography of Edmund Campion on a Friday over lunch one feels bound to eat fish.

  Title for a Betjeman poem: Despair in the Protestant Truth Society Bookshop, 21st December 1953.

  The Christmas card bore the head of a large dog – one of her least favourite animals and an inappropriate message – Kind Remembrances. Perhaps Tom does that to Catherine after they have parted. She almost hates him.

  The unsuitable Confirmation presents – books chosen because they were small and in special bindings, e.g. A Shropshire Lad, The Rubaiyat, Shakespeare’s Sonnets – or even Latin poets like Catullus.

  After Tom’s death, Elaine, who is staying with Tom’s sister, wants to meet Deirdre and Catherine for lunch (‘ He spoke so much of you’). What can they order – Braised heart, thought Catherine wildly. Should they drink? Ought they to feel hungry? Who would pay the bill? T’s sister, presumably. Deirdre and Catherine seemed to band together. Who had loved him the most? The nightmare quality of the talk.

  For Deirdre it’s pass on quickly to the next one (Digby), as it should be. Deirdre had put on rather more make-up than usual, had painted dark, fierce eyebrows – so they would get quite the wrong impression – a tall, thin, rather fierce looking girl, with her hair scraped back in a kind of tail.

  Geography learned the hard way by bitter experience on the edge of tears.

  But are Christians always and necessarily pleasant people? Who could like the Wise Virgins in the Bible, for example? Is that one of the trials of it all – that one must be prepared to be disliked?

  Catherine goes round the back of a Holborn church (St Alban the Martyr). V. strong smell of incense – candles 3d. each. Outside two ladies sitting by a small bowl electric fire on an upturned box talking about the vicar.

  Woman like a Henry Moore figure. Tom’s mother in the garden?

  The viol, the violet and the vine … it sounded like – but could he possibly have preached on that text?

  How irresponsible of Professor Monod to go down in M. Cousteau’s bathyscope instead of coming to the I.A. I. meeting.

  1954. One woman rings up to enquire about a man friend at his office and is answered by another woman, who gives her full details of his symptoms etc. ‘He is taking anti-biotic…’

  At the same table in Hill’s a man and a woman, middle-aged perhaps working in the same office, are having a fascinating conversation about immersion heaters.

  To Bob Smith

  47 Nassau Road

  22 April 1954

  Dear Bob,

  I had a letter from Jock recently. He liked Jane and Prudence very much. But the Americans and Continentals most definitely don’t and now I am feeling a little bruised! In answer to my enquiries Cape tells me that 8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and ‘declined’ (that seems to be the word) Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with J. & P. So humble yourself, Miss Pym, and do not give yourself airs.

  Best wishes and love,

  Barbara

  I look out of the window of the Kardomah and see a pale, moony youth, though with a rather sullen expression, selling a newspaper – Individual Action – Anarchist Publication – in huge letters on a poster.

  September. Portugal. The fluty, well-bred English voices in the Portuguese bus – rising above the chatter of the natives – talk even of Harrods. And ‘Everything’s so clean – spotless. The people are so obliging.’ The advantages of holidaying in a feudal country.

  7 September. The Englishwoman (about 50) is almost aggressively sunburnt, displays her rather scraggy neck and chest in a low-cut cotton dress. She sits on a canvas chair, wearing sunglasses and a scarf on her head, meditatively picking the skin off her nose which is peeling. NB. This is me, on the last morning at Foz do Arelho.

  Driving through the Portuguese villages one notices and comments (British reaction) on some irrelevant things, objects like a run-over cat or dog lying on the dusty road.

  Lisbon, Hotel Metropole. Near the Moorish style railway station. Dark little room looking into a well. I can see them washing up at 11 o’clock at night. The lower part of the walls covered with striped canvas like luggage (it’s like living in a suitcase), the dim light and the grey iron bedstead like a French film. Setting for a Graham Greene novel.

  Estoril is very like Bournemouth except that the beach is much smaller. On the promenade sits an old man with a stall of secondhand objects. Some of the jewellery, rings, etc must surely have belonged to exiled royally.

  I cannot reach up to pluck the prickly balls of a plane tree. Once it might have looked young, charming and gay, now only middle-aged and eccentric.

  5 October. This afternoon I painted streaks in my hair with process white; later blew up a paper bag and popped it. It made a splendid noise.

  On the 26th of June 1905 (according to the tablet which I can see when I peer down the steps) the men’s convenience in the middle of Fleet Street, crossing over to Fetter Lane, was opened.

  Since reading Maiden Voyage (when I was in Portugal) and the Journal I have been besotted with Denton Welch – am collecting and reading everything.

  10 October. Today finished my fourth novel, about the anthropologists (no title as yet). Typed from 10.30 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. sustained by, in the following order, a cup of milky Nescafé, a gin and French, cold beef, baked potato, tomato and grated cheese, rice pudding and plums.

  In a love affair it comes as something of a shock to a woman to realise that the man does not of necessity feel that everything about her is delightful (the long Victorian ear-rings with the old raincoat).

  To receive a love letter and to be eating honey on a June morning (in a bed-sitting room in London). This was in 1939 – me in Upper Berkeley Street. The letter was from Jay and the honey from Jock (Miel d’Hymette) from Athens.

  28 October. Lovely warm, windy morning. Rushing exuberantly into a Whitechapel train which seems to have a kind of glamour.

  Perhaps to be loved is the most cosy thing in life and yet many people, women I suppose I mean, know only the uncertainties of loving, which is only sometimes cosy when one accepts one’s situation (rarely perhaps).

  18 November. At lunchtime went into Zwemmers Gallery to see some pottery by Picasso and lithographs by various people. I must have had a distressed look on my face for the man in charge (dark, youngish) told me I could take the price list round and then himself accompanied me round the exhibits. Perhaps he was cold and wanted to stretch his legs. Anyway he was very charming and paid me the compliment of treating me like a person who could afford to buy something. Then a man with a beard came in and he was much bolder than the rest of us and lifted the lid off a great soup tureen with a bold gesture. I shouldn’t have dared. There was a wonderful big blue pottery duck, priced £80.

  ‘I thought that Flotum made out that Mbum was a Bantu language,’ said A.N. T. ‘Oh he didn’t try anything of that sort with me,’ said M.B. indignantly.

  31 December. Had lunch with Edward Gardner at the Olde Cocke Taverne – hadn’t seen him for 20 years. This makes me feel like Prudence, as when I have lunch with married men contemporaries. With the years men get more bumbling an
d vague, but women get sharper.

  29 March 1955. Today I am cross with D.F. and ‘rebellious’ but I just have a poached egg at the Kardomah (but a chocolate biscuit with my stewed apple) then go to Bourne and Hollingsworth and Dolcis and don’t hurry back, yet I am back again by 2.20. Then I write in this little book.

  At St Mary Aldermary (Canon Freddie Hood’s church) one hears the shrill whirr of the telephone through the organ music.

  From a bus in the Strand I see someone from Oxford days, looking very much the same, red in the face, hair only slightly touched with grey, a little stooping. He goes into Yate’s Wine Lodge. Then I seem to remember hearing that he had not done well, been a disappointment, perhaps, even, taken to drink. (Did this occur to me after I had seen him enter the Wine Lodge or was the thought already in my mind?)

  30 April. At the Women’s University Settlement I see Miss Casson wearing a dress that I sent to their jumble sale some time ago – and very nice it looks. Bob and I have lunch and then walk in the park among the young green trees but he feels that Nature is not enough so we go into the Church of the Annunciation at Marble Arch – so near the Cumberland Hotel. Lofty but impressive with the lingering smell of incense. Fine red brocade-covered sedilia and a marble side-table – did the vicar bring them back from Italy? As we are standing there Bob says ‘Oh I wish I were still in the Church of England’.

  4 May. I give blood in the crypt of St. Martin in the Fields. The donors are all rather ordinary-looking people – the women burdened by shopping baskets. I can imagine (for a novel) a little, frail laden woman saying ‘Oh I have given blood’ and putting others to shame. My right arm aches so that I can hardly write – is there any connection, I wonder?

  5 May. The knowledge might come to me – and I dare say it would be a shock – that one wasn’t a particularly nice person (selfish, unsociable, uncharitable, malicious even).

  15 May. I went to All Saints Notting Hill with Bob to High Mass. On the way we passed Westbourne Grove Baptist Church and heard records of hymns blaring out. How trying to live opposite! It would surely work on one’s conscience to be lying in bed when such music was going on. All Saints is splendidly Catholic – 3 priests. Sean MacAteer (whom I know) was the celebrant. We began with Asperges (later at tea Hilary asked what was the connection between Asperges and asparagus). The three priests in their lime green vestments with bands and birettas look like dolls bobbing up and down. Fr Twisaday, the vicar, is an elderly dried up celibate, irritable and tetchy. He fidgets in the pulpit, times things alarmingly with pauses so that one wonders if he’s just forgotten what he was going to say and will fall down in a fit. The sermon, urging us to keep Ascension Day as a day of obligation, was quite good. Then he remembered a notice about a meeting in the Albert Hall and began talking about that, all mixed up – how many tickets to send for, etc. Apparently he lives in a large vicarage with a private oratory – the only telephone is there and he doesn’t like the curates being rung up.

  WHAT IS MY NEXT NOVEL TO BE? It can begin with the shrilling of the telephone in Freddie Hood’s church and end with the flame springing up – the new fire on Easter Saturday in the dark church. Hope and a blaze of golden forsythia round the font. But what about the middle?

  When starting to tell a story you have to choose exactly the point to plunge in. Perhaps on a fine Spring afternoon at the induction of a new vicar – ‘We had had an early lunch.…’

  20 May. With Bill H. of Twentieth Century Fox to see a play at the Polish Candlelight Club in Chepstow Villas. The Polish lady apologises because the Ladies cloakroom isn’t very nice – but I want to say ‘Oh but it’s splendid!’

  Falling in love takes away spontaneity because you’re always thinking of things to say or write.

  ‘You never asked about my furniture,’ he said.

  ‘No, there seemed so many other things to talk about.’

  (They all come before her in her imagination – but in his is only a wardrobe or a table.)

  ‘I am no longer convinced of the validity of Anglican orders,’ he said rather stiffly – and, indeed, how else could he have said it for it was not a cosy subject – the approach to the door in Farm Street on a cold Winter evening.

  2 July. Back at my own church, on a cool greeny-grey English Sunday. We start with a George Herbert hymn – ‘King of Glory, King of Peace’ – very English, like a damp overgrown churchyard. What different conceptions one could have of God according to the country one was in – those sun-baked cemeteries in Marseilles.

  He had solved the problem of how to end the letter by putting ‘Yours in haste’. I was astonished – I could not imagine such a thing.

  15 July. Went into St Alban’s Holborn mainly because I was frustrated at not getting a lettuce in Leather Lane market and it seemed a cool and quiet place. Inside the candles burn to St Alban – big ones. I lit one and put money in the box (like Denton). Over the confessional which has purple curtains, a violet coloured stole is flung. Outside the church is a courtyard, round which are the Stations of the Cross, with a seat where I sit and read the parish magazine. Don’t quite like to smoke or read Proust.

  20 August. Saw today: a woman with bright purple hair, her expression under it all understandably surprised; two well-dressed upper-class women, chinless; an elderly fragile clergyman and his wife, arm-in-arm, she with the remains of elegance. When the Winter comes we can read Denton again. October to March are his months.

  24 August. Saw today a nun coming out of a telephone box. An early Betjeman – Mount Zion in touch with the Infinite.

  8 September. In the office 3.55 p.m. Even at this moment some dreadful thing may be happening – a husband deciding to leave his wife, a love affair being broken, somebody dying, languishing with hopeless love or quarrelling about the Church of South India in the Edgware Road as I nearly did with Bob on Sunday. And I sit typing, revising and ‘translating’ Harold Gunn’s ms [changing the American spelling], waiting for tea.

  13 October. To the Proust exhibition with Bob – a rather reverent atmosphere – odd-looking, peering women. How Marcel must have driven his printers mad with all his corrections! Many photographs and portraits. Scott-Moncrieff looks not at all as I had imagined – a rather round-faced young man in uniform with tartan trews.

  15 October. In the train going to East Croydon. Rereading all of Denton now, beginning with Maiden Voyage. ‘Nothing could be gayer than a red lacquer coffin,’ he says (p. 152). Oh darling Denton…

  Less Than Angels out on Monday. Rather dreaded. Denton says (p.195) ‘I thought how nice it would be to have burnt sacrifices offered to me when I was dead.’

  21 October. Reading In Youth is Pleasure. D’s favourite adjective is ‘charming’.

  25 October. Went for a walk along the river with Bob – from Hammersmith Bridge along towards Putney, past Harrod’s Furniture Depository. It is vast when you get up to it, pinky brown brick and ‘Grinling Gibbons’ decorations, swags of fruit etc. Many blank, blind-looking windows, some a little open. Inside what! One likes to imagine acres of decaying furniture riddled with woodworm and white ants. Great trunks of musty clothes. I suggested furniture brought back from India in 1912 for which the owner had never had a flat big enough. Nearby is a building that looks like a kind of chapel and, of course, the Turkish domes of the main building. Down the front white marks. Bird droppings? We know about the Dominion of the Birds.

  I noticed in church last Sunday how young some hymn writers die.

  3 November. Evening out with Bill H. pub visiting. Standing with feet hurting a little at bars, one all mirrors and mahogany and happy little queer couples – another semi-Moorish in decor in Leicester Square wedged in between two cinemas.

  It was to have been an evening of seduction (?) in the office over the Rialto cinema, the room lit by the pinky glow from the neon signs outside. A balcony with an interesting view – packed humanity round Lyons and the Prince of Wales Theatre. But it didn’t turn out quite as he wished. How hungry I was
eating ham sandwiches, why don’t men think of eating more? Then I wanted to go to the lavatory I but the cloakroom was on another floor and had to be unlocked and I we couldn’t find the right keys! Got the mortice key stuck in the lock. All the time I was striking matches and feeling more and more uncomfortable. But there was such a strong element of farce that one couldn’t help laughing! Eventually to a pub in Rupert Street (The Blue Posts) where the landlord preceded me up the stairs apologising for not very good provision for Ladies Toilet. It was a large room with a big mirror over the mantelpiece and tables with chairs piled on them. The kind of room that might be used for a meeting. In a corner and up some steps the door leading to ‘the toilet’. Quite adequate! Why are people always apologising to me for such things when one wants only the bare essentials.

  December. Feast of St Barbara. I began talking about my novels, whether I should go on writing about the clergy etc. Then it occurred to me what a bore I was being and I had the idea of a young man walking with the elderly female novelist, worrying about the gathering darkness and the park closing and should he take her to tea at Stewart’s or the Marble Arch Corner House or would it be sherry time or what?

  On TV I thought that women have never been more terrifying than they are now – the curled head (‘Italian style’), the paint and the jewellery, the exposed bosom – no wonder men turn to other men sometimes.

  Shrove Tuesday and St Valentine 1956. Back at the office ‘better’. On these occasions and perhaps on occasions of unhappiness too one might unburden oneself to one’s hairdresser and enjoy the cosiness of non-intellectual conversation. Wilmet can do this when Piers has been unkind. Hilary was told by a woman whose daughter was having trouble with her husband, ‘You see we have discovered that he is a sodomist.’ How dreadful it sounds in a full plummy tone or dark and hushed.

  31 May. Corpus Christi. Benediction and procession at All Saints with Bob. It was advertised in The Church Times – priests were asked to wear chasubles (?) and ‘plain cottas’. Afterwards in the church hall we met Sean MacAteer. He has charm, wrinkles his nose when he smiles. Such a display of charm is surprising, even a little shocking. Later when we are in a pub, Fr James comes in with the thurifer.