A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym
Page 29
I hope you survived Christmas – we had four people staying for part of the time, and it is a rather exhausting ordeal for the churchgoer, particularly as we had two ranting sermons, not quite the few words of greeting and comfort one expects at that time. And Lent begins early this year.… I sometimes think I shall give up going to church for Lent, but have never yet had the courage.
All good wishes,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
16 February 1964
Dear Philip,
It was a lovely surprise and pleasure to receive (on Ash Wednesday) a copy of The Whitsun Weddings – thank you so much. As I immediately began reading it, with the breakfast still to be cleared away, I wondered if I’d ever told you how much I liked your poems. If I never did I hope it wasn’t really necessary – it was just one of those things that went without saying (which is perhaps why it ought to have been said, as Miss Compton-Burnett might remark). Anyway.… Quite a lot of new ones and a favourite I’d seen in your Anthology (‘Faith Healing’), not to mention ones cut out of The Listener, now all together in ‘handy form’ for reading in Lyons or in bed.
Did you see in one of the Sunday papers that my late publisher is to publish a book by one of the Beatles (John Lennon? I think?). That and Miss Bowen should give their list the variety it has seemed to need lately.
All good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
The previous vicar’s wife couldn’t have presided at Bingo – but this vicar’s mother does, rather grimly as if a duty.
When she is grooming her cat she has to put on her spectacles to see the fleas, gleaming red-brown among the combings. ‘I must say, she keeps Pussy spotless.’
25 March. I take my lunch to the darkest corner of the Kardomah, to the table near the door of the Gents Cloakroom where the silly office lovers used to sit. Where are they now? …
Sunday at Joan’s – a bit much to have to listen to Maurice Quick praising Joan and saying what ‘a lovely sense of humour’ she has when I sit there dumb and uninteresting. How often do women have to listen to praise of other women and (if they are nice) just sit there agreeing. And yet men don’t do it maliciously, just in their simplicity.
29 March. Easter Sunday. Coldest since 1903. But the church is warm and full of people. In the evening go to supper with Richard. We eat cosily in almost total darkness (one candle). On the mantelpiece many Easter cards and a telegram. One couldn’t really give him anything that he hadn’t already got. Not even devotion and/ or love. It gives one a hopeless sort of feeling. Roman Emperors (a Coles wallpaper) on the wall facing the bed which is large and covered in orange candlewick.
The Unsuitability of Easter Cards – a gold cross wreathed in Spring flowers (violets).
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
7 April 1964
Dear Philip,
I was amazed at Jill. Such maturity – and detachment and ‘Sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo …’ it was difficult to believe it had been written by a boy of 21! Of course it is very well written and observed too – I don’t mean to sound surprised at that, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so good. And remembering A Girl in Winter one wonders why you didn’t go on writing fiction, and regrets it. I suppose you were too good and didn’t perhaps sell enough, and then you preferred writing poetry? But couldn’t you possibly give us a novel now and again – those nine years in a northern university … surely, you are being rather selfish? And the Introduction is splendid, though one could have wished for more.
Anyway, that’s what I feel about it and no doubt lots of other people will too. I should be tempted, not to write a thesis on the possible origins of the working-class hero in post-war Engl. fiction, but to produce a scholarly note on the occurrence of the name ‘Bleaney’ (see Jill p. 73).
I wonder if you have bought a car yet? No doubt you will have decided by now which kind best expresses your personality or gives the impression you would like to create. I think I see you in a medium-sized car, nothing too flashy, but I may be wrong.
I never thanked you for returning the typescript of An Unsuitable Attachment, which I have put aside for the moment but shall perhaps revise one day. I think it an excellent idea that somebody should ‘go over’ in Rome. I am struggling with my new unfinished one, which is set in the country mostly and has about ten chapters roughly written. Over the coldest Easter for 80 years I tried to beat the first two chapters into a better shape now that the characters are becoming clearer, but why is the material in a novel so recalcitrant? It ought to be easy when you think that you can do exactly as you like with these people and have absolute power to change them in any way you will. I like writing, but am rather depressed at future prospects for my sort of book. Once you said, I think, that not everybody wants to read about Negro homosexuals. It seems appropriate that I am now reading James Baldwin’s Another Country lent to me by a young friend. A ‘powerful’ very well-written book, but so upsetting – one is really glad never to have had the chance of that kind of life!
This letter doesn’t really convey the great pleasure I’ve had from Jill and The W. W., but I hope you’ll take the will for the deed. (Is that right? One is sometimes wrong about these proverbs and saws?) I was amused to see in Peterborough ‘Jazz Reviewer’s Poems’. Of course I think of ‘Poet’s Jazz Reviews’ or even ‘Librarian’s Poems’.
With all good wishes,
Yours
Barbara
May Day. At Covent Garden with Skipper. He crunches ice as we drink orangeade in the Crush Bar – the great oil paintings, the flowers (real). A happy evening. If ‘they’ went to Covent Garden Leonora would like to feel the touch of his sleeve against her bare arm (but that would be as far as it would go). Close, intimate red and gold semi-darkness. Here he is mine she thinks, the young admirer she has created for herself. Quinton [later ‘James’] plays his part with rather self-conscious enjoyment.
12 May. Athens. Jock’s party. British Council Representative in Viet Nam, Mary Renault arriving all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple black. Elizabeth Taylor – the smile on her face as she looks at me when the band at the taverna (Johnny’s Place) is playing ‘Colonel Bogey’. The taverna is very much like Cecchio’s in Rome, even to the display of food as one enters and the lurking cats. In the beautiful Zappeion gardens, the delicious fragrance of shrubs, the oranges hanging from trees. Here a middle-aged English or American lady might be picked up by a young Greek adventurer.
Drinks with Charles Shoup (a deraciné, rich American painter) in his wonderful flat with views of everything and a lovely terrace. Many bits of marble and odds and ends he has picked up – sculptures, a miniature wooden confessional, a red fox rug on the sofa. Elizabeth is there looking sad as it’s her last evening.
20 May. At Delphi, which is wonderful. We pass through Erythrai, where there is a good baker. Thebes (the dump of old cars). Miss the crossroads where Oedipus killed his father (asleep) but saw it on the way back. Helicon and Parnassus. At Levadia the bus stops long enough to visit the ‘Toilettes’ and have a drink and eat little bits of lamb on wooden skewers.
2 June. My birthday and dinner with Richard at his flat. Champagne and a lovely present. A Victorian china cup and saucer. ‘The Playfellow’ – a lady and her cat.
To Richard Roberts (Skipper)
40 Brooksville Avenue
30 June 1964 (6.45 a.m!)
Darling Richard,
Here it has been summery and yesterday I saw Bob. We had a large lunch and then I had taken the afternoon off so we went to Bourdon House [a rather superior antique shop]. It was a rich experience, my first visit and should be used in some fictional setting. Of course there were several things I should have liked – a nice pair of mirrors 295 guineas, I think. Even the smallest malachite egg was 7 gns.
Then Bob came back to have tea here. His unexpectedly early arrival and my going away for t
he weekend meant that the house was dusty and full of dead flowers – perhaps a not inappropriate setting for a not-very-with-it novelist, but he didn’t seem to notice. How full of fictional situations life is! I am now making fuller use of all this and have gone back to writing a novel I started some months ago. I am alone so much at the moment that it seems a good opportunity.
Much love
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
18 August 1964 (Night)
My dearest Skipper,
Thank you for sending back the letter. It was perhaps silly and capricious of me to ask for it, but I was punished by the disappointment of finding that an envelope addressed in your hand contained only my own letter back again. So that will teach me (‘Behaviour’, indeed!).
Anyway this little note will contain all the fondness of the other letter, in a concentrated form like a cube of chicken stock or Oxo. It had been meant to stretch from Wednesday evening last week and to greet you when you got back from where you didn’t go! Here it rained incessantly and the office is in chaos anyway with redecoration, tidying and throwing away old files and other melancholy tasks. At lunchtime I went out briefly – it was the kind of day to be horrid to somebody, like that other day, but luckily the opportunity didn’t arise. This evening we went to see some friends and they were disposing of some books, so I got a Christina Rossetti (just right for pressing a little cyclamen in) and E.B. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, with an inscription dated 1901. Rather the sort of poets Ianthe might have read?
I have thought of a few more good scenes that I might write in, one inspired by the idea of you and Bob having lunch together, though it won’t really be a bit like!
I hope you are reasonably well and happy – I really mean very well and reasonably happy – no more of those sad looks that cut me to the heart, Skipper dear. I would send you Peruvian heliotrope if I knew where to get it. But love anyway,
Barbara
At Buckland. Trials of a novelist. Miss Conway or Mrs Godwin has read one of my novels, but which? We go through all the titles but none seems to ring a bell – so embarrassing (‘You read it – I was too busy!’).
4 September. (Oh what a month August was too!) Walking in Hampstead with Skipper. Parked the car in Church Row and went up by the Huguenot Cemetery – all beautiful in the dark, warm evening. Into the little R. C. church on Holly Mount, R. lights a candle but I don’t somehow like to and don’t say anything either. It is a bit too much like something in a B.P. novel. Later we walk to Windmill Hill, Admiral’s House, see Galsworthy’s house etc, have coffee in the High St. Talk and wander about peering into people’s uncurtained windows and even their letter boxes. And on Thursday he is going to Venice.
9 September. The language of flowers … in Gamage’s an artificial pond with plastic waterlilies. What do they say – the same as Mizpah?
10 September. She (Leonora) thinks perhaps this is the kind of love I’ve always wanted because absolutely nothing can be done about it!
Telephoning me this afternoon Richard asks that I should leave him all my notebooks! No. XX [she numbered all her notebooks] he should certainly have. Perhaps this one (XXI) too.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
14 September 1964
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for your letter, and card from Northern Ireland. It seemed a very original place for a holiday, but I daresay even that isn’t as remote as it seems and I could hear the strains of that transistor from that person sitting on the rock. I wish I could have another holiday, but I used it all up going to Greece, which seems such a long time ago now. I sometimes wish I were a University person, even with a ‘crushing teaching load’ – but I suppose the Library is open all the time, isn’t it, even if the Librarian is not there? You will need to gather your strength for the beginning of your Library extension. It does seem to cost rather a lot, but then estimates for building do seem rather remote and difficult to grasp. I suppose it is a good thing that you have joined SCOLMA, which always sounds like a kind of breakfast food or perhaps a tonic for tired academics? Our library has been made slightly more interesting – in a macabre way – by a rather peculiar young man joining the staff. He doesn’t come in till 10.35 most mornings and is given to cryptic utterances which one can only half hear. I don’t have much to do with him myself but hear all this from the other staff. I find it is pleasanter to observe these things rather than actually participate in them.
I have now got all your books and wish there were more. It seems wicked when there are so few novelists one can bear to read.
I am gratified that you have been re-reading mine and have even spoken of me with John Betjeman, who certainly reviewed me very kindly. I have got some way with another one, but at the moment I have turned back to An Unsuitable Attachment and am trying to do something to that in the hope that it might be publishable. A friend who had come fresh (as it were!) to my work read it and made some more suggestions, and as it is now getting on for two years since I finished it I can look on it with more detachment. But every now and then I feel gloomy about it all and wonder if anybody will ever want to publish anything of mine again. When I have finished my revision perhaps I might avail myself of your kind offer to introduce me to Fabers – if it is still open!
Yours etc
Barbara
From the novelist’s notebook – Sunday 4 October 1964 – sent to Richard Roberts as a letter
‘Are you going to fry them?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Yes – why not?’ Immediately she was on the defensive and saw the kitchen as it must appear to his half-American eyes – the washing-up from lunchtime, the litter of things not thrown away, and the paw-marks on the table.
In silence they watched the sausages lying in the frying-pan. After a while the fat began to splutter.
‘They’re bursting,’ she said unhappily.
‘I always prick them with a fork,’ he said in a kind tone.
‘Well, yes, I did prick them.’
‘With your fingernail?’ He smiled.
‘No, with a knife, I think…’
… Afterwards, when he had gone, it was that part of the evening she remembered – her appalling domestic inefficiency and the meagre meal she had given him when he must have been rather hungry. What was it about him that brought out this curious inadequacy in her? Then another occasion came into her mind. Something to do with a tin of ‘luncheon meat’ (who, she wondered were the people who ate it for ‘luncheon’?). It was only much later, in the watches of the night, one could have said – that the other occasion came back to her, the one for which she really needed to be forgiven. Would he, she wondered, put it down to her anthropologist’s ‘enquiring mind’? That seemed too generous to be expected even of him. Perhaps it had been a desperate attempt to break down the awkwardness and loss of rapport she had felt between them, rather than a feminine desire for a scene with carefully thought-out bitter dialogue. (Enjoyable to write, though, she couldn’t help feeling with the detached part of the mind that watches us behaving in situations…). And in a way perhaps it had succeeded – she certainly felt better in the morning. She hoped he did too.
In church she prayed for them both and resolved to ask him for a proper meal (with cheese) very soon. It gave her a curious kind of pleasure to think of him preparing his luncheon, arranging his table in the elegant way he always did, in the cool clean Sunday morning ambience of Sussex Gardens, in that bright, sparkling air, free from the cats’ hairs which caused him such distress in Queen’s Park. Any cats’ hairs there, would be Siamese, as he had pointed out…
So you see, my dear, how with a little polishing life could become literature, or at least fiction! I hope you get its poor little message, or that it at least entertains you for a moment.
My love,
Barbara
11 October. Yesterday afternoon R. called just as I had finished putting my hair in rollers. He had been b
urgled – now the lovely square gold watch and the platinum and diamond one (in the style of the 20’s) left him by his father had gone. He needed company – so we had tea and he took us to a political meeting in Hammersmith to hear Sir Alec [Douglas-Home]. Then we went to Sussex Gardens for a drink. R. was in his scarlet pullover and rather long navy raincoat. Very sweet, but not, perhaps, Skipper ever again.
7 November. Lunch with R. at 231. Sherry, bean and bacon soup, crab and salad and chocolate cake. And Orvieto which (he said) he had remembered as being my favourite. Indeed! (But milk poured from the bottle).
Prof. Beecher is a Reader for one of the University Presses. By his bed is a small manual, almost like a devotional book: Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press [Oxford] first ed. April 1893.
18 November. Description by R. of the peacocks (on his mother’s estate in the Bahamas) being shut up at night ‘in a small greenhouse’ to protect them from the dogs (or was it one special peacock?). Afterwards he and I went up to the General’s and had coffee and collected two pictures. Everyone said how well I looked – ‘blooming’ – but is that joy at seeing R. again or what over three weeks away from him has done –
27 November. Lunched at the Golden Egg. Oh, the horror – the cold stuffiness, claustrophobic placing of tables, garish lights and mass produced food in steel dishes. And the egg-shaped menu! But perhaps one could get something out of it. The setting for a breaking-off, or some terrible news or an unwanted declaration of love.
28 November. Today as I sit in Lyons, a man comes to the table and a middle-aged woman is fetching food for him as I have fetched it for my darling R. on more than one occasion.