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

by Barbara Pym

  I have no literary success to report. A reader at Barrie and Jenkins went so far as to admit that she had ‘enjoyed’ my book, but prospects of publication seem to get bleaker. In the meantime I will try to go on with the University one and maybe one day you may read it and advise me about it. But oh the effort of getting things finished. Did you see on the back of the Sunday Times today about the girl who is starting the Orlando Press, erotic books written by women for women? What can they possibly be like? (I shall look out for them with interest.)

  I hope you are not feeling depressed (or won’t be when you get this letter). I’m not sure that I agree about memories always being unhappy or uncomfortable ones. I find as I get older that I tend to steer clear of any kind of memories or push them away, unless I want to call them up for any special reason. But when I’m unhappy or depressed I do find myself remembering ‘better times’, those good reviews of my novels etc. but that doesn’t make one any more cheerful – on the contrary, Nessun maggior dolore … and all that jazz! But now I want to pass my driving test and I want to publish another novel, and even to write another novel to my own satisfaction, so perhaps my mind is filled with all that, and I am lucky.

  Our church has become ‘redundant’ and been closed! There’s something I should like to write about. Now I can go around from church to church with no particular attachment. Neither my sister nor I really want to get involved anywhere at the moment, having had enough of all that to last a long time.

  Yours ever,

  Barbara

  10 November. Mr C in the Library – he is having his lunch, eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, a glass of milk near at hand. Oh why can’t I write about things like that any more – why is this kind of thing no longer acceptable? A failing novelist, but coming up to my 4th driving test on the 19th. Not that you won or lost but that you played the game. Only it doesn’t seem to work out like that. Slow, careful and safe.… All the same I failed. I had Mr Bloomfield again. But afterwards he was quite nice and cosy, like talking over one’s shortcomings with a priest after confession.

  4 February 1972. Now that the possibility of being ‘buried’ in the country looms, one goes about one’s bit of London taking it all in. But so much is being pulled down, especially between Fleet St and Aldwych (by King’s College). And Gamage’s is to be closed and pulled down. Oh unimaginable horror!

  Lunch in the Kingsway Kardomah reading The Church Times (even that has gone off – no Answers to Correspondents). A tiny little elderly woman clears the tables – only about 5 ft high or less so that one nearly knocks her over with one’s tray. Her little wrinkled claw-like hand comes towards me with a J-cloth to wipe the counter. Go away old crone, I want to say. The best place to sit is in the window, watching the cars come down Kingsway and stopping at the zebra crossings. The only places to have lunch now: Kingsway Kardomah, Holborn Kardomah (The Dutch House), Gay Fayre opposite the Prudential – very squashed but one could sit in the window there on a high stool and watch Gamage’s being demolished. Then the Tea Centre in Lower Regent St is good too. ‘You get a nice class of person there.’

  6 March. Gamage’s is having its final sale before being closed and demolished. A dreadful scene with empty counters and tumbled merchandise and people walking about like zombies. This is the year of change and decay, though presumably shoe-box buildings will spring up on the site of decay.

  Being told that it is ‘virtually impossible’ for a novel like The Sweet Dove to be published now (by Constable). What is the future of my kind of writing? What can my notebooks contain except the normal kinds of bits and pieces that can never (?) now be worked into fiction. Perhaps in retirement, and even in the year before, a quieter, narrower kind of life can be worked out and adopted. Bounded by English literature and the Anglican Church and small pleasure like sewing and choosing dress material for this uncertain summer.

  To Bob Smith in Lagos

  I.A.I.

  7 March 1972

  Dear Bob,

  At last we are moving the Institute to 210 High Holborn, then this building is to be demolished and so is Gamage’s – a whole period of civilisation gone! Perhaps the rot set in with the closing of the Kardomah all those months ago. The new offices are nice but far less spacious than old St Dunstan’s Chambers and we shall all be rather cramped. Hazel and I have a room rather like the one here but smaller. Of course the new place will be more convenient – nearer to the British Museum, SOAS, Bourne and Hollingsworth, Marks and Spencer and other desirable places.

  Much love,

  Barbara

  20 March. The ABC café in Fleet St, opposite the Law Courts – new but ever old. The new name (The Light Bite), the smart orange and olive green and beige and stripped pine decor, the hanging lamp shades, the new green crockery – but inside the food is the same, the little woman cooking, the West Indian lady serving the tea, the nice, bright efficient lady at the cash desk. You might quote Cavafy’s poem about finding a new city, yet everything being the same, meaning oneself sitting there brooding.

  Have thought of an idea for a novel based on our office move – all old, crabby characters, petty and obsessive, bad tempered – how easily one of them could have a false breast! But I’d better not write it till I have time to concentrate on it (look what happened to the last).

  3 April. Easter. At Buckland on Good Friday I had a migraine, oh the shame of it. As one gets older, the difficulties of being a guest, helping and not helping, doing and not doing.

  19 April. In the new offices, the move successfully accomplished.

  Now I wander round Bloomsbury, scene of so many and distant past glories. Who can ever live here now?

  The ageing white woman in the office. Beside the mysterious depths of the black girls she has nothing, no depths, no mystery, certainly no sexuality. She is all dried up by the mild British sun, in which she may sit in a deck chair, eyes closed against its ravages.

  10 May. Sitting at lunch in the help-yourself in Bourne and Hollingsworth I think why, those women sitting round me are like lunatics in some colour supplement photographs of bad conditions in a mental home. Twitching or slumping or bending low over their food like an animal at a dish (especially if eating spaghetti).

  To Philip Larkin

  40 Brooksville Avenue

  29 May 1972

  Dear Philip,

  What better time to reply to your letter than a cold windy cloudy Spring bank holiday, huddled in warm clothes, with a cup of coffee and a cat crouching on my desk? At least I shan’t be tempted to go and sit in the garden and sleep in a deckchair.

  One begins to wonder what is going to happen to us all, though mercifully one doesn’t seriously worry yet. Kingsley Amis is 50, but I think you aren’t yet or not quite? I am 59 this week and next year shall be an OAP or a senior citizen – special terms for hairdos if you go between 9 and 10 a.m. on a Monday or Tuesday and no doubt other privileges. The kiddies and the old people.… I’m not sure that I like that.

  Quite a lot of news since I last wrote! My sister and I have bought a cottage at Finstock (14 miles N.W. of Oxford) near Witney, Charlbury, Woodstock etc and hope to move into it later this summer, having sold this house. I shall still be working for another year anyway and shall try to find a room in London to live in during the week, as I wouldn’t have the strength to commute from Oxford every day, though many people make even longer journeys. What a pity one can’t still live in Bloomsbury for a pittance – that would suit me very well. I might advertise myself in the Church Times and now that I have definitely given up smoking I could say ‘non-smoker’, which would add to my desirability (gentlewoman, Anglican, quiet, ‘business lady’ etc) as a tenant. A pity one can’t offer oneself to the advertisers who ask for ‘4th girl share super Chelsea flat’.

  We have also moved our offices from Fetter Lane to High Holborn – not a very great distance, but very different in most respects. A smaller more modern building and we are all more squashed together and have less
privacy. But nearer to shops, the British Museum, and many Italian restaurants, second-hand bookshops, Marks and Spencer. I long to write a novel about the office move and the strange passions aroused and the unpleasantness about who was to go where – perhaps when I have the time I will. My novel about Leonora is now with Chatto and Windus who wrote a kind letter saying that they would be glad to consider it, but I haven’t very much hope. It’s amazing though how many publishers there still are that I haven’t tried, so I may go on with it. I have been too busy or too lazy or too discouraged to go on with my provincial university novel, though I much appreciated the local colour about the stink after the Sit-in!

  Who will be the Poet-Laureate? It might well be you, but would you like it? Poor old Auden, coming to five in Oxford because he feels he might fall down or be taken ill and nobody would know, surely he isn’t that old? Betjeman might be the best choice? I liked your article on him in the Cornhill, but I think women (I at any rate) do enter into what he describes more fully than you perhaps realise, even the business girls in Camden Town and even perhaps ‘And now dear Lord I cannot wait, because I have a luncheon date!’

  All good wishes,

  Yours ever,

  Barbara

  19 June. The position of the unmarried woman – unless, of course, she is somebody’s mistress, is of no interest whatsoever to the readers of modern fiction. The beginning of a novel?

  22 June. Wilfred Whiteley’s memorial service. The death of a younger colleague – that could be part of my novel about old people. Belief and non-belief. A rather bleak sort of service in a way.

  6 July. Living at Finstock and with no permanent base in London now. A strange life and in the heat of Monday feeling quite ill at Paddington and having to be ‘careful’, then at lunchtime throat constricted and unable to eat. Most disconcerting. But gradually better. Saturday morning in Charlbury – the dead (dying) baby bat in the gutter with its chocolate brown fur.

  Keats walking in the fields of Kilburn is what I should like to know more about.

  Lovely walk on Sunday evening to Wilcote, St Peter’s church with the little grassy graveyard and overlooking it the (apparently uninhabited but knowing Finstock probably not) back of a tall house, the windows overlooking the tombstones. It is left to me to find the dead bird, the dried up hedgehog body, the mangled rabbit.

  2 October. Love between a middle-aged man and woman (i.e. Jane and Nicholas in Jane and Prudence) has softened into mild kindly looks and spectacles. Now consider how it might be in the unmarried middle-aged women in the office. Both have had affairs of some kind but now they can express love only through a tenderness and solicitude towards each other. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea,’ ‘Shouldn’t you go home.’ These feelings that should have been directed towards husband or child.

  The man in the office would bring his own lunch of course.

  An older woman would say, ‘Now what are your marriage arrangements?’

  Could go back dispassionately naming earlier wives and mistresses.

  What is a man’s and what is a woman’s work in an office?

  Couldn’t there be lots of acrimonious salary discussions and going into budgets? How do they spend their money. Who brings what for lunch. Smoked salmon, 2oz. Their director has no notion of what things cost – send him into Sainsbury’s, an old man with a basket.

  Someone has given John Middleton a folding umbrella – surely a woman – one could hardly envisage the exchange of such gifts between men.

  To Philip Larkin

  Barn Cottage

  Finstock

  32 Balcombe Street

  London N.W.I.

  24 October 1972

  Dear Philip,

  As you will see, I am now very well established in two places. I have been very lucky to find a nice little room in the house of friends of friends and I stay here Monday to Friday. Balcombe Street goes up from Dorset Square and is between Baker Street and Marylebone stations. Indeed as I lie in bed in the early morning I can sometimes hear the station announcer from Marylebone booming away about something. I have been here since August and now feel very much at home. I have ‘use of kitchen’ and make my own breakfast and evening meal (‘dinner’ is perhaps not quite the word for it). Then on Friday evening I go to Finstock (good train from Paddington) where I have a different sort of life. Rather strange and disorientating in a way but I feel I am getting the best of both worlds. Recently we had a monk staying – a cousin of my hostess.

  We like Finstock very much and the people have been very friendly. It is not a beautiful village but so near all those lovely places like Minster Lovell, Burford, Swinbrook (grave of Unity Mitford in the churchyard), Westwell etc etc. Our house (cottage) is in the olde bit and was originally a 17th century barn, converted about six years ago. We have beams in every room, but modern comforts too. We have two bedrooms and a tiny spare room – sitting room and kitchen open plan – bathroom downstairs. A double garage! Excellent for storing all those odds and ends we still haven’t been able to fit in. We had to dispose of quite a lot of furniture as our house in London was bigger. But this is much better – less work as one gets older! The cats love it and after a rather traumatic (for us) first night or two have settled down very well. Tom’s idea of a ‘happening’ to amuse a party of ladies was to enter suddenly through the window with a not quite dead mouse in his mouth.

  The church is not very high (‘Series 2’) but there is quite an enthusiastic congregation of people who have come fairly recently to the neighbourhood. Hilary and I are a bit jaded and cynical about things like bazaars but try not to show it. Like most country parishes the Vicar has 3 churches to cope with (not like the old palmy days of which I write in Some Tame Gazelle when every village had its own vicar or rector).

  I haven’t been doing any writing – my divided life hardly allows it – though I tinker with my provincial university novel sometimes. Next year when I’m due to retire I shall have more time. And I can’t think whose biography to write as friends urge me to! There is another novelist in Finstock – Gilbert Phelps who wrote The Winter People (about South America). He is very nice.

  I wonder how Betjeman will do as Poet Laureate, what he will write. If you had been P.L. what would you have written – much less predictable. I expect you are glad not to be? I enjoyed your 50th birthday tribute though nobody chose all my favourite Larkin poems – Roy Fuller chose one, I think.

  Great staff dramas in our office – that set up suggests itself as fruitful novel material, but no time to go into that now.

  Very best regards,

  Barbara

  31 October. How unsuitable to be reading Harold Acton’s Memoirs of an Aesthete at lunch in Lyons (Jolyon) after a rather dire little service at St Alban’s Holborn. Series 4 I should think. Oh pray for the Church of England!

  5 November. Walking in Oxford on a Sunday afternoon – to look at the changed St Hilda’s from the outside, though the gardens look the same. Then to Addison’s Walk and deer and beech trees shedding their leaves. A good place to lie down waiting for death covered in leaves by the still streams.

  8 December. The woman with the dogs very much in Baker St station these days. This morning the almost unbearable pathos of seeing the two of them curled up together asleep in a carrier bag.

  A lonely person found dead with no food in the house (but what else would be there?). A cultured woman who has worked in an office, who realises that she is in danger but is too late to stop herself.

  January 1973.

  There could be talk in the office about elderly people being found dead with no food in the house.

  ‘One might have a tin of soup but lack the strength to open it, or even to tear away the cellophane from a packet of biscuits.’

  21 February. My novel has its umpteenth rejection (from Cassell). After lunch with Dirom at Oodles we go to Red Lion Square and I enter the portals of Cassell’s to collect the nicely done-up MS. Where next? Up to Faber in Queen’s Squ
are?

  27 February. Sometime in the early 1960s they had cleared away the undergrowth in the park and everyone said how much better it was. People couldn’t throw things there or molest children (kiddies). But now the bushes were beginning to grow again and in places gave enough shelter for our heroine to conceal herself when the man came round at dusk blowing his whistle to get everyone out before shutting the park. I have fallen through the net of the Welfare State, she thought, picturing this more as a coarse serviceable hair net than a net to catch trapeze artists.

  To Philip Larkin

  32 Balcombe Street

  13 March 1973

  Dear Philip,

  Now that Christmas is over, and winter almost, and spring really here (in the country) I begin to look forward to my retirement though it won’t happen all at once when I reach ‘the age’ in June. I’ve already had papers to fill up and it’s rather a comfort to think that somebody is prepared to pay me money for not working. Ironical to think that I used to look forward to retirement as the time when I would really be able to get down to writing! No doubt I shall try something and perhaps when I have more time I shall do it better – but to what end, if not publication?

  We are in a confused and disturbed state at the place where I work – Professor Forde (now nearly 71) wishing to retire (or his wife wishing him to) but nobody suitable to take over – and what is the future anyway for Institutions like ours, founded in the twenties to help Africans to get school-books in their own languages? It is a rich subject for fiction if one can look at it with a novelist’s cruelly dispassionate eye, as I fear I sometimes can. Added to all of which – should we register for VAT?! I was incensed to receive a communication from Cape asking if I proposed to register – the very small income I make from my books is much smaller because of their refusal to publish me any more!