by Barbara Pym
St Barnabas Pimlico: I have only been there once to the wedding of an anthropologist friend (Ioan Lewis who married the daughter of the Master of Balliol whom he met at a bus stop). The church I used to go to when we lived there was St Gabriel’s, Warwick Sq., the model of the church in Excellent Women, really.
Much love,
Barbara
For my next – the middle-aged, or elderly novelist and the young man who admires her and is taken in by her.
Sister Dew would lower her voice and talk of ‘a very big operation’, meaning, of course, something female. Men were somehow rendered inferior by this.
22 March 1962. In Gamage’s basement I buy (for 1/–) a little Italian bowl with a lemon and leaves painted inside it. It really pleases me, although it is chipped and I begin to wonder if I am getting to the stage when objects could please more than people or (specifically) men.
A woman living in the country who has had a hopeless love for a man (wife still living perhaps or religious scruples), then, when he is free she finds that after all he means nothing to her – is this the reward of virtue, this nothingness? Or an enviable calm – (He then, presumably, goes and marries a young girl).
Mervyn’s general dislike of books and reading (commoner than one supposes in a librarian) should be emphasised.
An old woman living in a village with her two husbands (a modern instance of polyandry) one divorced – but, poor thing, unable to cope on his own.
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
I.A.I.
15 June 1962
Dearest Bob,
I am glad you have got the Ife lectureship, though I could really wish you had got a job in England again. The other evening (Thursday late shop-opening) I emerged exhausted from Marks and Spencers wondering where on earth I could go to sit down (without having to order a Wimpy or anything like that) and suddenly thought of All Saints Margaret Street, which-turned out to be deliciously cool and restful and only one lady there – no violet-stoled priests lurking to force Anglican ladies to make their Confessions. (That sounds like one of Mr Kensit’s pamphlets in the Protestant Truth Society, doesn’t it.)
The P.C.s [the vicar of St Lawrence’s and his wife] are on holiday and have done an exchange with Fr Francis Ibbott from Norfolk. He has come to the vicarage with his house-keeper whom he acquired in Luton. He is rather nice and sings splendidly. The P.C. s apparently locked up their bedroom and the study. Wouldn’t you think that a bit odd, if you were the exchanging clergyman – as if they didn’t trust you? Or is that naive of me?
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
13 October 1962
Dearest Bob,
Hilary has just slipped along to the Jumble Sale at St Ann’s Hall. She was curious to see their hall and also thought she might pick up a bit of Fabergé or something. We haven’t seen Richard Roberts (met with me in summer 1962) again yet as he is still away. We did like him so much and hope to see him again.
The Yoruba is out of print but being reprinted – in the meantime I have sent you by seamail (on Friday) a spare copy of my own. Of course it is a mere summary and rather inadequate now, though it gives one some idea. It contains some of Miss Pym’s earliest work though you might not think so from her later writings. How nice of you to want my new novel – a few people do, I think, though not really enough. I asked Wren Howard [at Cape] about paperbacks and Penguins and he said they had tried but without success to get my books done so perhaps it is true what I heard that you must have sold ten thousand in hard covers before the paperback people will consider taking a book. Incidentally Jock is wrong about Daniel George having left Cape – he is still there in his little back room, I’m glad to say. I have tried to read T. Shandy and it is the sort of book I should like to like but all that really appeals to me is that marbled page and the blank page – which vary in beauty acording to what edition you have. Perhaps it could be a book for old age.
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
15 December 1962
Dearest Bob,
I thought, surging through Smith’s in Fleet Street today, ‘I’m just a tired-looking middle-aged woman to all those (mostly young) people, yet I have had quite a life and written (or rather published) six novels which have been praised in the highest circles.’ Did I tell you (I think not?) that I had a farming letter from Lady David Cecil (Rachel, daughter of the late Desmond MacCarthy) saying how much she had enjoyed No Fond Return? Did you ever read her book, Theresa’s Choice – a delicious portrait of Lord D. and her other suitors.
My next is getting on, quite flowing now. I am at the depressed stage when I begin to type out some of the early chapters and think that not much of it will do – I can only hope that I will get through this stage, but my first four chapters always seem so dragged out, even when I rewrite the beginning. It is nice of you to have wanted a new BP for Christmas. Angus Wilson has got to look very old, I think, a ruby-coloured face and cloud of snow white hair, not at all as he used to look. I heard him give a lecture on ‘Evil in the English Novel’ at University College – very good, as a matter of fact.
I had Evelyn Waugh’s life of R. Knox (out of the splendid public library on the way home) and thought what a pity it was he ever went over to Rome and how beastly it must be for a priest to do it and become a Roman priest.
Love,
Barbara
I.A.I.
11 January 1963
Dearest Bob,
I am writing this in the office on a Friday afternoon, surrounded by the raw material for the April Africa, the proofs of various books, and a shopping bag containing tins of cat food, frozen fish cakes, packet soups etc.
The first thing you wanted to know was about Richard and Jock. The latter had told me of meeting R and his friend, he thought they were nice but rather overawed by Elizabeth Taylor, who was there at the time. Richard dined with us at the end of November so we got a fuller picture from him of the ‘literati’ who flock to see Jock. He thought Elizabeth seemed very bored, but knowing her I should say it was her usual manner which conceals her shyness. Hilary and I are very fond of Richard – we dined with him in December – we met Maurice Quick, a nice young man called John something, and a young Siamese action painter just over here and it was all very cosy. Now Richard is in Nassau with his parents and is, I believe, intending to go to Mexico. He sent us a very pagan Christmas card and also a beautiful postcard from Nassau.
I have finished my novel and Hazel has read it in MS, but we are still struggling to find a title. It should really be called The Canon’s Daughter or An Unsuitable Attachment but Cape won’t like either of those, so we are casting about wildly and the best we have found so far is Reserved for Crocodiles, which is eye-catching indeed – and after all any title can be written into the text! I still have to revise and improve a little – this time there are rather too many references to pink paraffin, as there were to Tio Pepe and gin in A Glass of Blessings. I am reading Morte D’Urban, an American RC novel, very funny.
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
8 February 1963
Dearest Bob,
Such an ironical thing happened – I had started a letter to you last weekend on my typewriter, telling you that on Friday last, 1st Feb., we had a burglary and leaving the letter in the typewriter to finish later. But on Monday, 4th Feb., the thief or thieves broke in again, this time taking the typewriter with the letter in it! So I suppose you will never get that letter. I can’t remember quite how much I told you, except that they hadn’t taken the MS of my novel, but only small items of jewellery and Hilary’s camera. But on Monday they took the typewriter, an electric fire and some silver. The police of course came very quickly and have the matter in hand though I don’t suppose they will ever catch him or them. I think it was having it twice that was so horrid – of course it was done during the day when
we were both out and the neighbours heard nothing. Everyone is being very careful now, but it gives one an insecure feeling. Yet all our friends have had to undergo this, so why not us – I suppose all experience however unpleasant can be turned to good effect in fiction.
I have finished my novel and the best title seems to be An Unsuitable Attachment, though as ‘they’ are almost certain not to like that I have got several more titles in reserve. Hazel and Hilary have both read it and seemed to like it, but I am still making a few final improvements before sending it to the publisher. I feel the effort of it all is so great that I shall never write another, yet even now vague ideas begin to turn over in my mind.
We had terrible ‘voltage reductions’, no heat from electric fires and no TV picture till 10.30 p.m. Luckily we have coal and paraffin too, though, and we managed to avoid frozen pipes and bursts which is a great blessing. Even the ‘toilet’ at the vicarage of St Lawrence the Martyr, Chevening Road, was frozen up on one occasion.
Mrs P. C. [the vicar’s wife]. ‘How are you off for candles, dear!’
B.P. ‘Oh, all right, thank you, and we haven’t had any total blackouts yet.’
Mrs P. C. ‘Well, don’t forget there’s plenty of candles in the church dear – I should take some if I were you.’
Love.
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
24 February 1963
Dear Mr Larkin,
Many thanks for your letter – and how quickly the time goes. And yet in other ways this winter has seemed endless. Was there a time when we were not forever on our knees filling paraffin stoves? I hope you are well (perhaps centrally?) heated – poets should not have to worry about how to keep pipes from freezing and all that dreariness – but I suppose it should be part of every novelist’s experience. (Though I suppose one could make too much of it!)
I sent my novel to Cape last week but don’t know yet what they think of it. I feel it can hardly come up to Catch 22 or The Passion Flower Hotel for selling qualities but I hope they will realise that it is necessary for a good publisher’s list to have something milder. It is called (at present) An Unsuitable Attachment, which I don’t think they’ll like, so I have various other alternatives. I don’t think they can make one have ‘Love’ in the title again. Did I tell you that there was a Librarian in it? Of course only in a small way – the Library is rather like ours at the International African Institute – not to be compared with University Libraries and their problems, need I say.… I will certainly let you have a proof copy when it gets to that stage but please don’t think that I expect you to do anything unless you feel like it, but anything in the way of a review would of course be very welcome, as I don’t suppose I shall get all that many! In many ways one gets to disregard reviews or lack of them as one goes on – seeing so many brilliant new works of fiction appearing, almost every week, and new young reviewers. But I am promised The Naked Lunch to read some time, so I shall see if I agree with Mary McCarthy or Philip Toynbee.
I was interested to read about you in John Wain’s autobiography and also (somewhere else) that you wrote about two poems a year. But I do wish, as I’ve said before, that you would bring out another collection of your poems – surely the time is ripe?
Yours sincerely,
Barbara Pym
The Unpublished Novelist
The effect of the so-called Swinging Sixties made Barbara’s novels seem unacceptable, especially to a publishing house like Cape which was beginning to specialise in what were then called ‘contemporary’ novels and whose list, as Barbara wryly remarked, consisted mainly of ‘men and Americans’. In 1963 they rejected her novel An Unsuitable Attachment. ‘Of course,’ she wrote to Philip Larkin, ‘it may be that this book is much worse than my others, though they didn’t say so.’ She would have been, as she always had been, willing to make any revisions her publisher thought necessary, but no one made any such suggestions.
The unexpectedness and finality of this blow (since in that particular literary climate no other publisher would take it) severely damaged her self-confidence. She felt that it was her failure as a writer that was the reason for the rejection rather than that the times were unpropitious for her kind of novel, and for a while she mistrusted her own talents as well as her critical judgement.
She started several novels, one with an academic setting which she though might be more ‘publishable’ – but she was never satisfied with them and they were never completed or revised. At no time, in spite of suggestions made to her by well-meaning friends, would she ever compromise and write in a style or form that was not her own.
In 1968 she completed The Sweet Dove Died, inspired, in part, by her fondness for her friend Richard Roberts, a young Bahamian who ran an antique shop. She sent the novel to various publishers (even, at one stage, under the name of Tom Crampton) but, in spite of its ‘stronger’theme, it was no more acceptable than An Unsuitable Attachment. ‘ Not the kind of novel’, one publisher wrote, ‘to which people are turning.’
There were some bright spots. In October 1971 her friend Bob Smith published an article entitled ‘How Pleasant to Know Miss Pym’ in the journal Ariel, the first critical appreciation of her work. In 1965 the BBC had serialised No Fond Return of Love on Woman’s Hour and her novels remained on the shelves of public libraries in the Portway Reprint Series. The demand from her public was still there.
In May 1971 she had an operation for breast cancer and made a good recovery. In 1974 she suffered a kind of stroke which had a curious effect, as of dyslexia, an inability to assemble the letters of some words correctly, a totally incapacitating disability for an indexer and proof-reader. She recovered from this quite quickly but was advised to retire from the Institute.
Hilary retired from the BBC in 1971 and in 1972 she had bought a cottage at Finstock, about 14 miles west of Oxford. Barbara had been living there at weekends and in a bed-sitting room in Balcombe Street during the week while she worked at the Institute. Now she settled with Hilary at Finstock, immersing herself in country life – jam-making, village activities (Finstock was a friendly, sociable place), the Local History Society. She now completed the novel that had been simmering in her mind for some time about four elderly people in an office and the effect of retirement upon two of them. She wrote it for her own enjoyment and for that of her friends, having, by then, little expectation of its being published.
In April 1975 she finally met Philip Larkin. They had been corresponding since 1961 when he had planned to write a review article of her next novel. Their meeting turned out to be like an incident in a Barbara Pym novel. Two shy and reserved people (‘ I shall probably be wearing a beige tweed suit or a Welsh tweed cape if colder. I shall be looking rather anxious, I expect’), they met at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Hardly had they sat down at a table in the bar when they were joined by a bluff, red-faced man, of the kind who attaches himself to strangers in hotels, who engaged them in jovial conversation for what seemed like hours.
H.H.
1963-1977
24 March 1963. To receive a bitter blow on an early Spring evening (such as that Cape don’t want to publish An Unsuitable Attachment – but it might be that someone doesn’t love you any more) – is it worse than on an Autumn or Winter evening? Smell of bonfire (the burning of rose prunings etc), a last hyacinth in the house, forsythia about to burst, a black and white cat on the sofa, a small fire burning in the grate, books and Sunday papers and the remains of tea.
1963 so far. A year of violence, death and blows.
The bad Winter up to the end of February without a break.
Death of Hugh Gaitskell.
Two burglaries.
My typewriter stolen.
My novel rejected by Cape.
Dr Beeching’s plan for sweeping away of railways and stations.
Reading The Naked Lunch.
The Bishop of Woolwich’s book Honest to God.
My n
ovel rejected by Heath.
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (60,000? copies sold on 1st day of publication [4th April]).
Daniel George’s stroke.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
12 May 1963
Dear Mr Larkin,
Many thanks for your letter of several weeks ago. I liked to think of you at those Library Conferences – it is comforting to know that such things go on in this violent world. As for the teapots and hot water jugs left standing on the polished table (and it being marked in consequence), I found myself thinking ‘What a fussy man’ – but then it occurred to me that perhaps the Warden was a woman?
Your kind intention to write something about my novels may not after all be fulfilled because Cape have decided that they don’t want to publish An Unsuitable Attachment after all! I write this calmly enough, but really I was and am upset about it and think they have treated me very badly, considering that I have been with them for thirteen years and published six novels, some of which have been fairly successful, even if the sales of the last two were rather modest. I was not altogether surprised because several other Cape authors have been similarly treated – I don’t know whether you have heard any murmur of the distant rumblings in 30 Bedford Square as the new regime gets to work with axe and bulldozer, but the Cape list is now certainly different from what it was and naturally one hopes that Jonathan is turning in his grave.
Of course it may be that this novel is much worse than my others, though they didn’t say so, giving their reason for rejecting it as their fear that with the present cost of book production etc. etc. they doubted whether they could sell enough copies to make a profit.