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

by Barbara Pym

  I have got Betjeman’s new poems – not so very new now, but they went out of print. Not very good value for money (you get more with Larkin) but of course one is glad to have them. I lately read T.S. Mathews’ biography of Eliot and apparently he often thought he would never write another line so it must be the sort of thing that all writers feel – but one does rather wonder if Shakespeare ever experienced it. But surely everyone must get the ‘so little done’ feeling as age creaks on? Here I am sixty-one (it looks worse spelled out in words) and only six novels published – no husband, no children. I do find though that people (especially at the hospital) now tend to call one ‘Mrs’ and it seems hardly worth the trouble to put them right. Anything is better than Ms. which American contributors to Africa were beginning to adopt before I left.

  It would be so nice if you ever did ‘find yourself’ in Oxford and we could meet and have lunch – or even if we could give you lunch here if your car should ever find itself near Charlbury or Witney. Best regards and wishes.

  Barbara

  29 March. A dire Good Friday service – the Bible (the gospel narrative) lamely paraphrased and meditations, so far from the old days when the preacher for the Three Hours Service would draw such a large congregation that extra chairs had to be brought in. A year now since my stroke and Deo gratias for my recovery.

  To Philip Larkin

  Barn Cottage

  15 April 1975

  Dear Philip,

  Thank you very much for your letter. I should like very much to meet you for lunch on 23rd April (Wednesday) and, all things considered, I think it would be best to meet in Oxford. I’m always glad of an opportunity to go in and the country is so wet and depressing at the moment.

  As for a meeting place, how would it be if we met at the Randolph? I should think at the entrance opposite the Ashmolean where people sit. I’m sure I should recognise you, but would you know me? I am tallish (5.8½ in the old measurements) with darkish brown hair cut short. I shall probably be wearing a beige tweed suit or a Welsh tweed cape if colder. I shall be looking rather anxious, I expect. About 12.30? Then if we don’t fancy the Randolph we can go somewhere else.

  Perhaps you are staying at the Randolph anyway or at St John’s? Looking at your letter again I see it’s a ‘Feast’ so we had better have an austere luncheon. Anyway, here’s hoping to meet you anyway.

  All good wishes,

  Barbara

  23 April. I had lunch with Philip Larkin at the Randolph sitting in the window looking out towards the Ashmolean and watching ambulances [echo of the Philip Larkin poem] driving up Beaumont St. What can I say? Wish I were a poet.

  To Philip Larkin

  Barn Cottage

  24 April 1975

  Dear Philip,

  Just to thank you for lunch and to send you this ‘artist’s impression’ of Barn Cottage (on the left, showing the front door) which was done as a ‘notelet’ for the Finstock History Society. I do hope you will one day come and see us there.

  I also hope the ‘Feast’ went off well and that you were able to enjoy a good breakfast this morning with well cooked bacon.

  I wonder if the man who got into conversation with us at the Randolph goes there every Wednesday (market day)? Perhaps I should stroll in there next week! After I left you I did a little shopping, then made my way to the station – having a few minutes to spare I went into the refreshment room and found myself sitting by a strange woman eating curry at 4 o’clock, a late lunch or an unusual tea.

  Thank you again and also for the kind things you said about my novels. I will try and get on with something.

  Very best wishes,

  Barbara

  12 May. Reading Heaven on Earth by Janice Elliot – a great ‘tapestry’ of a book in which I am now getting rather bogged down. Olive Wilson the ‘heroine’ might get together with Kate Brown of Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark – they might have a cup of tea together somewhere. I must get on with my novel – austere and plain though it may be – and get a new small notebook.

  28 June. When I wrote Some Tame Gazelle I didn’t know nearly as much about village life as I do now.

  28 July. Links’birthday. She would have been 88. Oh the mystery of it all – life, death and the passing of time.

  31 August. ‘Asphasia’ at a drinks party on Sunday morning. When talking I couldn’t remember the name of Dr Kissinger! That rendered me tongue-tied and speechless so that I couldn’t speak at all. It didn’t last long but must have been disconcerting for those involved. I wasn’t offered another glass of sherry but perhaps that was just coincidence! Later a slight feeling of pins and needles in my right hand which seems to go with it. On Friday night after watching a terrible telly programme I was conscious of seeing jagged coloured shapes all the time when away from the TV, but that soon passed. Was that anything to do with what I am now calling The Kissinger Syndrome? Is that why I am now incapable of finishing this novel that is so near its end?

  4 October. At the church to check the flowers. They are attending to the du Cros mausoleum [in Finstock churchyard], cutting the grass round it etc. Does a firm of undertakers do this sort of thing? There was a red Ford van parked outside.

  8 October. There was a recital of baroque music in Ramsden church. A very dry and rarified programme – it makes one feel like eating sloes, I decided, that astringent feeling in the mouth. Now I am taking the stronger Propanalol (40mg 3 X a day, 2 times as much as before). In the Library I read the effects it might have – so if you have nausea, diarrhoea, insomnia and generally feel a bit odd it’s just the Propanalol!

  20 November. General Franco died at last after being kept alive for so long and in The Times I saw that dear Elizabeth Taylor died yesterday.

  To Bob Smith in Ibadan

  Barn Cottage

  11 January 1976

  Dearest Bob,

  Jock seems to have got over his eye operation very well but is still very upset about Elizabeth’s death. Very little notice seems to have been taken of her but I am hoping that when her novel comes out there may be an appreciation in some of the TV book programmes. After all she was a friend of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard who are well in with the ‘media’. Still, what does it matter, really, such writers are caviar to the general, are they not, and fame is dust and ashes anyhow.

  Having turned the potatoes (doing nicely) I can now go on to more mundane matters. And what could be more mundane than trying to type a novel which I shall finish, but that will be it, positively no more.

  With love,

  Barbara

  17 February. Henry [Harvey] came to tea with a bad cold and bringing crumpets. Destroyed (in the fire, it being cold weather) some pages of a 1943 diary. The person who inspired the main reason for it [Gordon Glover] is now dead. Parts of it are worth keeping. Could one write a book (a sort of novel) based on one’s diaries over about 30 years? I certainly have enough material.

  23 February. Walked in the woods below Wilcote Manor and gathered wood (electricity bill of £77 arrived today). Now inspired to keep a daily diary as I’m reading No Halt at Sunset by Elizabeth Howland, a Norfolk housewife, published 1951 and reissued 1974. But she keeps pigs (3, with many piglets), has just got 1,000 chrysanthemum cuttings and is expecting bees. Nothing like that for me – lazy, doesn’t like housework, unenterprising (‘Barbara never initiates anything’ Daryll used to say).

  To Philip Larkin

  Barn Cottage

  8 March 1976

  Dear Philip,

  It’s Monday morning and when I’ve finished writing to you I shall get on with a little novel typing. It is slowly progressing but I don’t seem inclined to hurry as there seems so little chance of it getting published. Or perhaps I’ve just reverted to my natural indolence and anyway Professor Forde always used to say ‘Barbara has no sense of urgency’. Of course he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  I expect by now you’ll have got the Humber Bridge poem (epic?) well behind y
ou, even if you have to write another 20 lines to fill an extra 4 minutes. I thought of you specially the other day when I had to go to the Radcliffe for my six-monthly check-up, sitting reading a two-year old copy of The Field and wondering if my weight of 69 kgs. (fully clad) was anything like my normal 10½ stone. Anyway the sweet young houseman seemed to think I was more or less all right and I’ve certainly felt quite well, take exercise, even saw wood.

  I can’t remember if I ever congratulated you on your honour [in November 1975, Philip Larkin was awarded the CBE] – perhaps it came at a time when I wasn’t on the point of writing, so please accept these very belated felicitations. Was there any other interesting person being ‘done’ at the same time? It must be slightly nerve-racking, however homely!

  How nice of Gwendoline Butler to like my books! I know of her but haven’t actually read any of hers, though I did look for one in the library because I had heard it was a detective story set in Victorian Oxford, so I shall persevere.

  Oxford is beginning to be nice and springlike, or was last week. I recently had my wallet stolen when I was shopping one day – not being in beastly old London I suppose one gets careless, and I was wandering about with my handbag on my arm and it was the kind that could be opened by a stealthy hand. Only the wallet was taken and it has since turned up in Debenham’s (Elliston’s of old!) and was traced by the Barclaycard inside. I found myself hoping that the person who took the money bought something nice, or that it was a really deserving person. A ‘one-parent family’ or a fellow pensioner, though the last would be rather shocking!

  We have lost our dear old cat Tom, the black and white one, in his 16th year – peacefully at his home in West Oxfordshire at the end of January. He had been getting very fragile and thin (and very trying too!) but we didn’t have to take him to the vet. He just quietly expired on a copy of The Times one Saturday morning. When he became cold the fleas left his body – I suppose that was how one knew he had really gone. I’d never seen that happen before. We still have Minerva, our brindled tortoiseshell.

  Now I have finished reading another lot of ‘Romantic’ Novels and am able to read other things but don’t find many novels I like – I suppose that must be a sign of old age but there do seem to be fewer good ones. Do you ever watch any of the ‘Book’ programmes on the telly? I enjoyed seeing Kingsley Amis getting annoyed with some fellow participants (I can’t even remember now who they were).

  Yours ever,

  Barbara

  To Henry Harvey in Willersey

  Barn Cottage

  6 April 1976

  Dear Henry,

  I thought of sending you a suitable postcard, but perhaps such a long letter deserves a letter in return, though there won’t be a picture on this! The tap on the window, and its effect on us, seems to have remained in your memory and it did with us too because a few days after it there was a murder at Ramsden – apparently the poor woman surprised two burglars who had broken in and they killed her. So after that we became slightly nervous, not opening the door to strangers at night etc. So you see.… Anyway the feeling does wear off, and they seem to have caught the murderers.

  I can tell you how to give the impression of having a successful party – lights on, of course, visible from the outside, clinking of washing up being done in the sink, Television on, giving the sound of voices and music. We seem to have done all that on that night you called.

  But it’s much more difficult to provide other kinds of advice – ‘difficult’ – impossible would be a better way of putting it. Novel writing is a kind of personal pleasure and satisfaction, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

  Hilary and I are making plans to go for a short holiday in Greece. All being well (as my mother used to say) we shall go in four weeks time about. We should have sown some vegetable seeds before then (? is gardening enough. No!)

  Love,

  Barbara

  17 May. Greece has discovered Toyota (and other Japanese cars) also the plastic carrier bag – everyone carries one, even the priest in Nea Stira, an old, white-bearded man carrying a blue plastic bag. The sea and the beach (and indeed everywhere) are full of discarded plastic bags.

  19 July. Anthony à Wood died at 63, my present age. Better if I had followed an academic career rather than a novelist’s – but it’s certainly too late now!

  28 July. Yesterday was the day of publication of the large print edition of Some Tame Gazelle.

  30 July. Philip Larkin came to tea then walked up to the church to see the T.S. Eliot memorial. So two great poets and one minor novelist came for a brief moment (as it were) together. Philip took photos of us all with two cats outside the cottage. What is the point of saying (as if for posterity) what Philip is like. He is so utterly what he is in his letters, and poems. In the best, like ‘Faith Healing’, ‘Ambulances’, and even Jake Balokowsky, my biographer. ‘Life at graduate level’ as he once said about my novel No Fond Return.

  5 August. Yesterday we went to Spelsbury. Thought the church was locked (with new Yale lock) but in fact it wasn’t. We had gone to the vicarage where the vicar and a large black retriever came with us to the church. A very fine Irish brogue and indeed he was at Trinity College Dublin. In the churchyard outside is the large square-oblong tomb where Carys are buried, but all tumbled on top and a scatter of bones, dry and grey-white, a plastic top of something modern – yoghurt or peanut butter.

  6 August. A postcard of the Hardy statue from Philip Larkin. Shall I keep it as a marker in Hardy’s poems or Larkin’s?

  12 September. In the morning Maurice Rogers called and brought us the left-over Ramsden jumble for the poor relation Finstock. We kept a copy of the Apocrypha and some old clothes.

  21 September (staying with friends at Snape). On Thursday we went to Aldeburgh (full of refined-looking retired people) and spent some time at the 60–40 shop looking at second-hand clothes. Ploughman’s lunch at the White Horse (exquisite Ladies Room).

  24 September. Started back about 10 and stopped for lunch in Arkesden. Sad to think of Gordon dead after all those love affairs in that Village.

  25 September. Frugal lunch in the grounds of Middleton Park near the church. Went in and entered the Jersey Mausoleum, behind a gilded grille and heavy red curtains. Inside marble monuments and gloom, black and white floor and a storage heater (with instructions on how to maintain it).

  18 November. Having failed with Hamish Hamilton I think I might try a lighter country novel, funny even, but something romantic for Collins or Hurst and Blackett – such as a woman going as a housekeeper to a large house in some village like Ramsden.

  15 December. Writing to Pamela Hansford Johnson to tell her that Hamish Hamilton had already rejected my novel (Four Point Turn) [Quartet] when he had just written to her saying he was ‘eager to read it’! The embarrassment of being an unpublished novelist knows no bounds and what price the memory of publishers!

  10 January 1977. Yesterday a small congregation for the First Sunday after Epiphany – and ought not the Christmas decorations to have been taken down? A lapsed Catholic is no good to man or beast.

  12 January. Have finished my 1976 read of Romantic Novels. I am reading Sylvia Plath’s letters. All these years I seem to have misjudged her – the kind of person she seems to have been – dates with Amherst boys and at Cambridge that anthropological psychologist Mallory Wober. And liking clothes and hair-dos. Then alone in that bitter Winter of 1962–3 in a house in Fitzroy Rd – where Yeats lived – with two children, starting to write at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning – deserted by Ted Hughes – that was how it was.

  21 January. Yesterday we went to Delnevo’s the woolshop – synthetics on the ground floor, wools on the first. Oh I have such a feeling for wool. It would be a great joy to work with wool.

  Recognition

  In January 1977 The Times Literary Supplement published a list, chosen by eminent literary figures, of the most under-rated writers of the century. Barbara was the only living wri
ter to be named by two people, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, another long-time admirer of her novels. Partly because of the publicity, partly because the literary climate had gradually changed and partly because there had always been a strong band of faithful readers, her books were, virtually overnight, in demand again.

  Macmillan published Quartet in Autumn, Cape reprinted the earlier novels, she was asked to write features and short stories, to broadcast in the series Finding a Voice, even achieving the final accolade of being a guest on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. In November 1977 Quartet was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the BBC made a television programme about her life and work.

  The Sweet Dove Died was published by Macmillan in 1978 and was warmly received by the critics. She was also delighted by the success of her novels in America, where they were published by Dutton, and where she was building up a considerable reputation. ‘I am being taught,’ she recorded with surprise and gratification, ‘in an American university!’

  She took this sudden fame and recognition as outwardly calmly as she had taken the years of hurt and failure. She knew that she had not many more years of life. A secondary cancer had manifested itself and, although it initially responded to treatment, it became apparent to her that she could not be cured.

  She was very anxious to revise and ‘ improve’ her final novel A Few Green Leaves. She managed to complete a final draft just before she had to take to her bed, too weak to continue active life.

  She was concerned not to be a burden to Hilary, who had nursed her with such devotion, and arranged to go into Michael Sobell House, a hospice attached to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford. She was taken round it in a wheelchair and was, in a way, almost looking forward to going there (‘so much rick material’). Early in January 1980 her condition worsened and she was admitted to the hospice, taking with her her final notebook. Henry Harvey, visiting her on January 8th, found her wit and her courage undiminished. It seemed, somehow, fitting that almost the last visitor Belinda had should be the Archdeacon. Within a week, on January 11th, she died.