by Barbara Pym
Yesterday I was walking past a bookshop in Long Acre when I saw your face looking out from the cover of All What Jazz. Next to it were placed some Victorian photographs in those little folding cases of the period. There seemed no reason for the curious juxtaposition. It is a secondhand shop and everything is very expensive.
I suppose your Oxford Book is due out soon and I hope will be well received, though I suppose anthologies will always annoy as many as they please. I like Helen Gardner’s very much but it is too big – in actual bulk – to read very comfortably.
With the best of wishes (and for the Oxford B.)
Barbara
To Bob Smith in Aberdeen
32 Balcombe Street
13 April 1973
Dearest Bob,
I am really writing this at the I. A.I. where I am smothered in a mass of intractable French and English seminar papers which we are trying to make into a publishable volume. How nice it would be if the publication of such papers were to be forbidden by law!
No good news of writing, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve given up sending round the last one – 21 publishers is surely enough. Now I just jot things down in my notebooks, lacking the courage to start anything again though I suppose I will one day. Both Jock and I are longing for the sort of book which J. Guest in Longmans described as ‘not the sort to which people are turning’. I’ve just read The Golden Bowl and the last 2 vols of Leon Edel’s Henry James biography which I enjoyed very much. I got a bit muddled about Rye, though, thinking that it ought to be E. F. Benson dictating to the secretary when of course he came after H.J. He (H.J.) was worried in 1909 at the number of motor cars which seemed to be turning up in Rye. Happy, innocent days.
Have you any news of Richard? See how lightly I can write that now, as befits a woman on the threshold of sixty.
Much love,
Barbara
2 July. In the train. I can’t have a Pepsi, she thought. A woman of my age and appearance would be expected to order coffee. Yet she longed for the dark icy liquid and the prickle of its bubbles.
Things you can do in London: Austerity meal (with wine) at St Alban’s Holborn.
In order to cheat death or just to keep oblivion at bay their names had been given to Halls, lectures, memorial funds, prizes etc.
To Philip Larkin
32 Balcombe Street
11 July 1973
Dear Philip,
I hope the dust raised by the Oxford Book has now settled on the dark suit of the librarian – or perhaps he may be on holiday, having exchanged the dark suit for a T shirt – with an inscription like BIRD LIVES on the chest? It must be about this time that you take your car on holiday somewhere?
I am still at work, though I have just passed my 60th birthday, but various things have happened which make it difficult for me to retire immediately. To begin with our Director, Daryll Forde, suddenly died at the beginning of May – at work one day and dead that same evening. It was all very distressing and we have been rather like a rudderless ship, though things are beginning to settle down a bit now. We haven’t really found a new Director yet but have two ‘Acting Co-Directors’. I wonder how that will work out! There was a Memorial Service (‘Thanksgiving Service’ seems to be the term now) at the London University Church in Gordon Square. DF was nor a believer so it wasn’t very Christian though the Chaplain gave a kind of blessing at the end. It consisted of readings and music with an address by a colleague. Afterwards some of us were invited to have a drink in what was described as an ‘anteroom’ but really it was a kind of vestry with crucifixes and hymnbooks lying around and, on a hanger, a very beautiful white cassock or soutane, such as Roman priests in the tropics wear – that rather puzzled me. It was like something that I might have put into a novel, I fear. Anyway I am going on working for a bit but have told ‘them’ that I may feel like working at home in the country sometimes which I did rather successfully during June when my friends at Balcombe Street were away. I do rather agree with you about some of the difficulties of having no work, and when could one start drinking. Not before 12? Perhaps not gin and anything until 12? After all one doesn’t want to develop what the Americans call ‘a drinking problem’ which I gather quite a few female American anthropologists have. One might do quite a good study on that – it might well be linked with other ‘problems’ (into which we need not go!).
The only good writing news I have is that Chivers of Bath have agreed to do A G of B and No Fond Return in their new Portway Reprint Series for Libraries. So that means that all my books have been done in this way and people can read them. I’ve really given up sending anything round at the moment, but still find myself trying to write. But about old people!
I hope you are well and that this year is being a good one for you. London gets even more dire though one still has some affection for it. All shops are now Travel or Photocopying or Employment Agencies, with the occasional Sandwich Bar. (I mean the small shops round here, when they fall vacant).
Very best wishes!
Barbara
6 August. Beautiful Tudor-style Old People’s Home for sale. Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) perhaps rather a tiresome person. Just imagine her with Truman Capote!
2 November. All Souls. If only, Letty thought, Christianity could have had a British, even an English origin! Palestine was so remote, violence on one’s TV screen.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
16 October 1973
Dear Philip,
I hope all goes well with you. I still haven’t quite retired, and love being in the country. Life is very full and the village is in many ways like Some Tame Gazelle or even T.F. Powys! ‘Miss Hurt and the Paraclete’ might be one chapter. (Our vicar does sometimes preach a little above the heads of his congregation).
I have written a letter to The Author, sparked off by Trevor Hoyle’s account of publishing his own novel, about the difficulties even published novelists have now, so I hope it will be printed – rather more to the point, as far as I’m concerned, than this endless wrangling over Public Lending Rights, etc.
I am writing, quietly in bed in the early morning, a novel about four people in their sixties working in the same office. I don’t know if I shall finish it or if I do whether it will be any good to try a publisher.
Excuse this egotistical letter – why does one get like this? Sad that Auden and William Plomer have gone
Very best wishes,
Barbara
28 November. They have pulled down Gamage’s and so much in Fetter Lane including St Dunstan’s Chambers where we worked for close on 20 years. The emotion that place saw will never be experienced in 210 High Holborn [new offices of the I.A.I.]. Now flat – nothing but rubble and a deep wide hole in the ground. Walked back through Lincoln’s Inn Fields – so different from the summer – a bitter day, coldest for November since the beginning of the century.
12 January 1974. In Charlbury churchyard the older graves have sunk right into the turf – worn cherubs’ heads just visible above the grass.
27 March. Balcombe St. Dark, dull and rather cold. Woke early. ‘The Trout’ on Radio 3 and reading The Clever Woman of the Family [by Charlotte M. Yonge] in bed. At Holborn station a notice on the blackboard explains a delay ‘due to a person under the train’ at Hammersmith.
Small strope [stroke]. [This stroke caused a kind of partial dyslexia for a while, hence the spelling of this entry] Investigation revealsed breask canser and exces of calcium thought to be from canser but bone trace did not conferm them. Dr Burke examineed me (+ studenns) and suscepts excess of parathroughoid [parathyroid] gland in the neck. More test may reveil that a small operation on the neck may be necessary, so tomorrow bariom meal, urine tests etc. On Tuesday examination by Mr Bron eye specialist to see if any calcium there. But hopefully home cerca Wednesday. Asphasia: stroke?
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
3 June 1974
Dear Philip,
&nbs
p; It was a marvellous surprise to get High Windows last week, especially as I didn’t realise you had another book coming out. (I wish I could be more worthy of the very kind inscription you put in the book!) I am finding so much richness in it – I’m not sure that I agree with the S. Times reviewer’s choice of favourite poems, or ‘best’ poems – ‘Cut Grass’, in this lovely early summer is immediately wonderful, but so is ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’ – and what about ‘The Old Fools’ – horribly near the bone. The last rather appropriate as I have been ill for the last two months and am only now recovering. I have to be into hospital again tomorrow to have my parathyroid gland (or one of them!) removed. It was found that I had too much calcium in my blood – the doctors were certain that the cause of this was my cancer of 3 years ago but when I had a ‘bone trace’ it was found that there was nothing in my bones to confirm this diagnosis so they had to think again. I was an object of interest and had many doctors round me which was gratifying, of course. Apparently I have high blood pressure (which I never suspected) and have to take various pills of different colours. A subject for a poem might be ‘pills’?
I must apologise for all this, but it is no more than the truth and it seems to have changed my life in a sense, bringing my retirement nearer, though I had intended to retire in October anyway. So I am no longer going to London every Monday morning but have had a long convalescence and much enjoyed being in the country. I was in the Radcliffe the whole of April, except for a few days at home for Easter. I didn’t mind being in hospital and even found it quite interesting when I began to feel better. The food was quite good and I got to know a lot of people in the ward. The problem of being old is with one on such occasions, though. When I thought my days were numbered I did feel it was perhaps better to die in one’s sixties. I feel that if I were disabled or incapacitated I wouldn’t be able to bear it – wouldn’t be ‘splendid’, as women are expected to be – men too, no doubt.
I haven’t done any writing lately but think I will try again soon – at least to put words down on paper. Perhaps the only hope of getting published is a romantic or gothic novel?
Must stop now – I hope this letter hasn’t too many mistakes in it. When I was first ill I had difficulty in reading and writing but this is now improving. Imagine the irony of that!
Once again very many thanks for the book. I shall take it into hospital. The Churchill this time, where they say you get bacon for breakfast!
All good wishes,
Yours,
Barbara
4 June. In the Churchill Hospital. The mixed ward. The pathos of men in pyjamas and dressing gowns. Philip Larkin type subjects. The complex of buildings like mission huts. In the morning birds picking about in the grass.
23 June. T.S. Eliot baptised on 29th June 1927 at Finstock. The Bishop of Oxford came and dedicated the T.S. Eliot memorial. Then followed a week of gloom and rain. I tried to write and make An Unsuitable Attachment into a romantic novel but I doubt if it’s possible. On Friday I had been to the doctor who told me that I must retire and gave me a certificate for another four weeks.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
19 July 1974
Dear Philip,
Yesterday my sister drove me to London and we collected my ‘things’ from 32 Balcombe Street, including my winter clothes and the manuscript of a novel I’ve started to write about older people working in an office. It’s rather discouraging to go on writing with so little hope of publication but I try not to think about that. By the way, the letter I wrote to The Author about not getting published was never published, which seems to be the final accolade of failure.
Since I last wrote I’ve read more deeply in your new book and have learnt ‘Jake Balokowsky’almost by heart – how well I remember that kind of (Assistant) Professor from my days of dealing with American anthropologists. ‘The Building’ is most moving and disturbing – it’s a pity that so many of the people it could apply to will never read it, all the people sitting there.
I suppose you will be starting your holiday or ‘leave’ about now, though I suppose Librarians don’t necessarily have to take August like school holidays. For the moment I find it enough to be in the country and able to visit stately homes and gardens open to the public in the summer afternoons. It is pretty good too to be able to read a novel in the morning though my conscience doesn’t allow me to do that very often. Yet I can listen to the radio quite happily. I am doing some gardening and our garden is really rather pretty – mostly designed by my sister. She is now working part time in Oxford – I can’t remember if I told you – cataloguing modern Greek books at the Taylorian [Institute]. So now our roles are reversed and she goes out and I stay at home.
I wonder what your neighbours are like in your new house. I hope not too much noise from kiddies or washing on a Sunday morning. Even the nicest young people err in this respect! Or perhaps you have elderly people next door to you. I’m sure anyway that your car will sit primly in its own little garage rather than outside on the pavement. This sounds as if I am mocking you but of course I don’t mean to.
The sun is coming out again and I will turn to my novel. They say Graham Greene writes only 250 words a day, so I should be able to manage that!
With all good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
31 August. Our turn to do the flowers and brasses. If you forget and haven’t quite enough flowers will it do to put some object (? a stuffed animal) on the pedestal usually adorned with a particularly splendid flower arrangement.
11 September. A full country day. Started off with a visit to Dr. My blood pressure is better (‘super’). Retirement: I think – I am eating soup and jacket potato and drinking coffee in Oxford on a Monday. Letty would be doing this in a different place, probably in London among shopping women.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
1 December 1974
Dear Philip,
I hope you are really well settled in your new house so that you can hardly remember living anywhere else, though perhaps that doesn’t happen with houses, only places. Although I have been to London twice since my illness it now seems completely alien, and of course one is rather glad not to be there, all things considered.
I had a checkup at the Radcliffe in October and the consultant was pleased with me. I go to my own doctor regularly – he is young and very conscientious. When I told him I was going to London for my retirement party he advised me not to get too emotionally excited. Luckily I didn’t! The office gave me a nice lunch time party with wines and food and I was allowed to ask my favourite anthropologists and others. There weren’t too many speeches and I was presented with a cheque and the promise of my ‘present’ the New Oxford Dictionary which (very suitably!) happened to be out of print or re-binding.
I find that I enjoy my retirement very much – I suppose having been ill means that it didn’t happen in the way retirement usually does so the break didn’t seem so violent. When I got back to the office I found such a lot of different things happening (there is a new young Director in place of Professor Forde) that I was rather glad to be out of it all! I am still doing a little mild work e. g. the African tribal index for the journal and the odd bibliography which I find quite a good discipline, so that I work for an hour or two in the morning. Did I tell you that I have agreed to act as one of the preliminary judges in the 1974 awards for the Romantic Novelists Association?! I have so far read about 10 novels. They are extremely varied in type – some historical, others more purely ‘romantic’ in a modern setting. The one thing they lack is humour or irony – and of course one does miss that. But in a way they do seem to reflect some aspects of life that may be valid for the fortunate ones! As much as Doris Lessing or Edna O’Brien, or even B. Pym.
Very best wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
25 December. A full Christmas Day in mild windy weather. Ginger wine wit
h the Dores after church (duck in the oven), sherry with Vicki and Bob Redston (duck looked at and turned), punch with the Phelps (duck finally eaten).
2 February 1975. A day in Oxford 40 years on. Beginning in Duke Humfrey then a visit to the Ladies Cloakroom in the basement of the Radcliffe Camera (where smoking is forbidden), then in the local history department of the Central Library and after that lunch at Selfridge’s (beefburger, baked beans and chips). A wander round the various departments and then a visit to C & A and on a bus to the Radcliffe Infirmary where we get off and walk back to Little Clarendon St to Laura Ashley where I buy a bundle of patchwork pieces. Then a walk in the churchyard in Banbury Road, all almond and prunus in this early sun. Passing the Institute of Social Anthropology I saw they had blue curtains at the window and someone was cutting the grass.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
23 March 1975
Dear Philip,
For once it’s a fine Sunday morning and the meat is in the oven so I have ‘time’ for a letter. It’s funny how one harks back to one’s childhood and schooldays, when Sunday was the letter-writing time. Today is Palm Sunday and we have a service in the evening with ‘Prose, poetry and music’. I haven’t helped to choose any of the readings on this occasion or I might have been tempted to put in the Arthur Symons Naples Palm Sunday poem which would hardly be suitable. My sister has just suggested that as so few people now go to church Palms might be distributed at garages on the appropriate Sunday morning.
I hope you are feeling more like writing and perhaps generally in better spirits with the coming of spring. I do feel like writing sometimes and am very gradually trying a novel, doing a bit every morning when I can. I have also been doing a little work for my old Institute, but I do find that I am not reading all those heavy works that people always say they will read in their retirement.