What She Ate

by Laura Shapiro

  Barbara was shocked and angry, but she had heard about the ax that was falling at Cape and realized it was no longer a good home for her work. “I have got a new typewriter and propose to improve the novel a little before trying it on some other publishers,” she wrote to Bob Smith, a friend teaching at the University of Lagos in Nigeria. “I don’t think the book is much worse than my others, just not to present-day taste.” By the end of the summer, however, An Unsuitable Attachment had been turned down by three more publishers. She continued sending it out; then she wrote another book and sent that out, too; but nobody wanted to risk investing in “mild novels by Barbara Pym,” as she termed them in frustration. Often the rejection letters were full of praise—“so well written, subtle, witty and all that jazz,” she reported to Smith, “but of course ‘not a commercial proposition.’” The reader at Barrie & Jenkins remarked, “I am bound to admit that I enjoyed it,” while turning down the manuscript. Macmillan admired her “perfection of taste,” and Hodder & Stoughton said her work was “in perfect taste”; the publisher Peter Davies said she was “accomplished” and a “minor tour de force,” but in the end they all agreed with Constable, who told her “it was ‘virtually impossible’ to publish my kind of book nowadays.” “They are all like SHEEP!” she raged.

  Barbara had never parsed her reviews very closely. If she had, the sight of the publishing world suddenly backing away from her work might not have come as such a surprise. There were always a few critics who went into raptures, especially about No Fond Return of Love, which Tatler described as “a delicious book, refreshing as mint tea, funny and sad, bitchy and tender-hearted”—a review Barbara appreciated, though it’s impossible to locate a single sentence she ever wrote that qualifies as “bitchy.” But as we’ve seen, most reviewers couldn’t bring themselves to rave over work so seemingly slight, or female characters who just couldn’t take seriously the various passions associated with men. A short review of Less Than Angels, appearing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1955, may have settled her fate: she was praised for being “amusing” despite the limitations of “a small canvas and a neat, feminine talent.”

  She spent fourteen years of ignominy the same way she spent the previous thirteen years of success: she kept on writing. Some days she was hopeful, other days distressed, often she was bewildered, but she never stopped scribbling in her notebook or working at the typewriter. “My new novel is beginning to flow, for what that’s worth, and ideas come crowding into BP’s bounding heart and teeming brain (isn’t that in a hymn?),” she wrote to Smith in 1964, still early in the rejection years. Three years later she was more pessimistic—“I have finished the draft of another novel, but doubt if it will ever see print”—but she was determined to keep going. She knew her work attracted the term “cosy,” apparently the worst possible category to fall into, and wondered if she could get around that tendency. “I am trying not to write so much about the clergy which/who seem to be totally unacceptable now, and to find other subjects within my limited range. But I suppose one can’t really alter the way one writes or the things one notices.” Of course she couldn’t help it; she was addicted. “Lunch at the Royal Commonwealth Society with Bob,” she jotted down one day in 1968. “Why aren’t more of these elderly ladies wearing canvas shoes? I wonder. And in the restaurant all those clergymen helping themselves from the cold table, it seems endlessly.” Then she pulled herself back. “But you mustn’t notice things like that if you’re going to be a novelist in 1968–9 and the 70s,” she scolded herself. “The posters on Oxford Station advertising confidential pregnancy tests would be more suitable.”

  But she couldn’t stop. Three priests got into a car on Good Friday, while she watched and wondered: “Is there a rather good fish pie in the oven—or salmon steaks cooking gently foil wrapped. Or are they really austere?” At lunch in a cafeteria: “I think, why, those women sitting round one are like lunatics in some colour supplement photograph of bad conditions in a mental home. Twitching or slumping or bending low over the food like an animal at a dish (especially if eating spaghetti).” She read Kingsley Amis, she read Margaret Drabble—writers who never seemed compelled to zero in on the fateful implications of a steamed pudding, writers blissfully in step with the desires of publishers and editors. “What is wrong with being obsessed with trivia?” she wailed in her notebook. “Some have criticized my novel The Sweet Dove for this. What are the minds of my critics filled with. What nobler and more worthwhile things.”

  Barbara worked hard to come to terms with failure, and in the notebooks of the long fourteen years we can see her trying to rub the concept into her consciousness. Over and over she set down careful reminders that she was no longer a published writer, no longer the proud claimant to an identity she had donned back in 1948. “‘Notebook of an unsuccessful novelist’ might be a good thing to do,” she wrote, as if prodding herself to accept defeat. “I have so much material.” She was “a failing novelist,” she wrote, as well as a four-time failure at her driving test. She was “an unpublished novelist,” she was “Miss Pym (a failure).”

  The article that would rescue her life’s work, restore the only identity she ever wanted, and allow her to die in peace ran in the Times Literary Supplement on January 21, 1977. In honor of its seventy-fifth anniversary, the TLS had asked forty-two well-known figures from the literary, scholarly, and artistic worlds to nominate the most overrated and underrated writers or books of the past seventy-five years. The contributors plainly enjoyed themselves on this mission, especially when it came to the overrateds. In this irresistible category a few names came up several times—André Malraux and E. M. Forster won two nominations each, and Malraux would have merited a third had not Hugh Trevor-Roper called him a “charlatan” and thrown him out of the running entirely. David Hockney and Bob Dylan both cited the Bible as the most overrated work, though Dylan also cited it as the most underrated. (A. J. P. Taylor, too, felt the Bible was seriously underrated, but only the King James version.) For his “overrated” selection, Eric Hobsbawm rounded up “almost any contemporary United States novelist who gets into college syllabuses,” and Rebecca West singled out Anna Karenina. (“Young girls in love for the first time in their lives do not go to their first ball in a state of lust which would have done credit to the heartier class of hussar.”) But it was the underrateds that sparked the most publicity: only one living writer was named twice in this category, and it was Barbara Pym. She had been nominated by Philip Larkin, her friend and admirer of many years, and the biographer Lord David Cecil.

  She didn’t know a thing about it until two friends called that night, but the next day the news was reported in The Times of London—“my name appeared on the front page,” she said wonderingly. Even so, she was wary about celebrating too soon. If the article didn’t prompt any attention from publishers, she still had to count herself a failure, TLS accolades or not. Then the friendly letters from Tom Maschler started rolling in. Perhaps, he hinted, they would reprint some of her backlist . . . and he was curious about what had happened to the manuscript he had seen (and rejected) the previous summer. This was Quartet in Autumn, which she had sent to Macmillan shortly after the TLS article appeared. Macmillan quickly accepted the book, so when she wrote back to Maschler she had the pleasure of informing him that he had lost out. “Hilary and I invented a Maschler pudding—a kind of milk jelly,” she told Larkin.

  Macmillan also asked to take another look at The Sweet Dove Died, which they had turned down earlier. Now they snapped it up. Reporters from The Times and the Guardian came to interview her, which was exciting, though when the articles appeared she was taken aback. “I sometimes think that if you put them all together you would gain a rather curious impression of me,” she told the audience at a talk she gave a year later. “A tall, gawky woman who wants to go to South America on the Concorde and who reads Ovid and Vergil—a formidable combination, but only the gawky part is true, and even that was rather a surprise
to me.” Cape did go ahead and reissue her older books, the BBC made a TV film called Tea with Miss Pym, in which she somewhat awkwardly entertained Lord David Cecil in her garden while trying to keep the cat out of the cream jug, and in October 1977 she learned that Quartet in Autumn had been short-listed for the Booker Prize. Paul Scott won that year for Staying On, but even reaching the short list was impressive enough to be emblazoned on book jackets. The New Yorker asked her for a short story (she was thrilled, and “Across Crowded Room” was published in July 1979); she was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and The Sweet Dove Died, which had been turned down by ten publishers, became a best seller. There could not have been a more gratifying rebirth into the profession she treasured. Once again she was, as she wrote joyfully in her notebook, “Miss Pym the novelist.”

  • • •

  As an observer of British foodways, Barbara might have been hailed as an early practitioner of culinary fiction—that is, if she hadn’t been so incapable of taking serious gastronomy seriously. It was impossible for her to pour streams of lavish prose over a meal, and she was far more interested in what the food was saying than in what she herself could say about the food. She did read The Good Food Guide on occasion (it appears on a reading list she kept in 1970), and once, inviting a friend to lunch, she offered to take him to a restaurant she had found in the Guide—namely, her own home. “(Finstock. Barn Cottage Restaurant. Small cramped dining room; cat too much in evidence; carafe wine warming on storage heater; service willing but inefficient.)” In truth the whole idea of the Guide struck her as nonsensical, which made it just right for a novel, so when she started planning the characters for what would become her last book, A Few Green Leaves, she decided to include someone who reviewed restaurants for a living. Hilary brought home a copy of the Guide, and Barbara spent some happy moments with it, imagining a slew of restaurant critiques by one of the “awful good food guide people.” Ultimately she created Adam Prince, a fussy, self-important food critic whose very name assures us that he is first among men. Traveling from meal to meal, “tasting, sampling, criticizing,” Adam lives in fear that he has been served tinned soup or frozen vegetables and might unwittingly praise them. “That celery, cleverly disguised in a rich sauce, had it come out of a tin? The mayonnaise with the first course served in an attractive Portuguese pottery bowl, was it really home-made?”

  Perhaps if Barbara had been able to work up similar indignation on the subject of tinned soups and bottled mayonnaise, she would have established better credentials among food-minded readers. But she loved her gastronomic era just as it was, a time when frozen fish fingers and Chablis were invited into the same kitchen. Elizabeth David and Raymond Postgate were also living in that era, but they greatly preferred the good food to the bad and were hoping to liberate Britain from the latter. Barbara was different. As far as she was concerned, British cooking was not defined by awfulness; awfulness was simply one of its many entrancing facets. What she prized in life were its contradictions. To be alive and eating in the culinary mélange of postwar Britain was to have a splendid seat at the banquet.

  There’s a lovely passage capturing this sensibility in The Sweet Dove Died, when Leonora, painfully in love with a younger, homosexual man named James, is touring Keats’s house in Hampstead with James and his lover. The only other visitor is a middle-aged woman in a raincoat and plastic boots carrying a shopping bag full of books; and Leonora, who is one of Barbara’s many fine home cooks, glimpses atop the books a frozen dinner in its bright packaging. “Leonora could see the artistically delineated slices of beef with dark brown gravy, a little round Yorkshire pudding, two mounds of mashed potato and brilliantly green peas. Her first feeling was her usual one of contempt for anybody who could live in this way, then, perhaps because growing unhappiness had made her more sensitive, she saw the woman going home to a cosy solitude, her dinner heated up in twenty-five minutes with no bother of preparation, books to read while she ate it, and the memory of a visit to Keats’s house to cherish. And now she caught a glimpse of her face, plain but radiant, as she looked up from one of the glass cases that held the touching relics. There were tears on her cheeks.”

  Barbara, who put something of herself into all her heroines and occasionally wrote herself directly onto the page, turns up here as both Leonora and the plain-faced visitor. Her own ardent, rueful crush on a young gay man was transferred directly to Leonora; and in the raincoat-clad visitor, moved to tears at Keats’s house, we see the Oxford graduate whose heart was always open to our greater English poets. It’s the food that sparks the connection—fine cooking and a frozen dinner, caught for an instant in the same frame. Barbara’s world was there.

  • • •

  Early in 1979, Barbara went into an Oxford hospital for a series of tests that revealed an unspecified malignancy. She had been treated for breast cancer back in 1971 and felt confident after the surgery that the disease was vanquished. Now she learned it was not. She started a course of radiation, and although her condition worsened in the course of the year, she managed to finish A Few Green Leaves and send it to Macmillan. She even started planning a new novel—two young women, college, World War II. By November it was difficult to write, but when she was admitted to the hospital that month she kept her notebook with her—just in case there was something to notice, one more jewel dropped in her path by a benevolent deity, to be gathered up and saved in a scribble. Happily, there was indeed one more, and it became part of the final entry in her literary notebooks. “I’ve just eaten a kind of supper—vegetable soup, baked beans and sausage!” And, noticing that the ward housed both men and women, she added a couple of lines from one of our greater English poets, John Donne—“Difference of sex no more we knew / Than our guardian angels do.” She died on January 11, 1980, right after breakfast. Virginia Woolf said that death was the one experience she would never describe; for Barbara, it was that last tray of porridge and tea.

  Helen Gurley Brown

  (1922–2012)

  If we’re home for dinner—perhaps around 8:00 P.M.—I cook for David, bring his simple little repast on a tray, don’t eat with him but have something satisfying before going to bed around midnight. Are we weird or something . . . separate dining times and separate menus? Lean Cuisine meatballs and spaghetti, chocolate milkshake made with Optifast for hubby. . . . If my weight’s okay, dinner for me might be muesli with chopped prunes, dried apricot, six unsalted almonds, dusting of Equal, and a cup of whole milk. Delicious! If weight-fighting, it’s back to tuna salad with one slice seven-grain toast and half a tablespoon of diet margarine. Dessert every night is that whole package of sugar-free diet Jell-O in one dish just for me—one envelope couldn’t possibly serve four as directions suggest—with a dollop of peach, lemon, strawberry or whatever Dannon light yogurt on top. Fifty cals—heaven!

  —I’m Wild Again

  Helen Gurley Brown wrote her life story many times; in fact, she seldom wrote anything else. Of the ten books she published between 1962 and 2004, eight were autobiographical, including The Writer’s Rules, a highly personal guide to turning out “positive prose.” She also kept herself on display in the pages of Cosmopolitan, the magazine she edited for thirty-two years, not only via the editor’s column that appeared every month, but throughout the rest of the issue. No matter who wrote an article or what it was about, nothing went to press until every paragraph glittered with her personality, her convictions, and her writing style. The enormous archive of her papers at Smith College contains drafts of more such personal writing—some two hundred pages of an autobiography, for instance, typed and revised in 1962–1963 but never finished, and a similar project that she began three decades later and also left incomplete. “Never did write a real biography,” she scribbled on the latter manuscript before packing it up with her other papers. The word “biography” jumps out here. Was she always writing about somebody else, as she typed her life story again and again? It’s a
s if she knew she hadn’t said it yet, or said it right, or reached the center. Helen may not have read T. S. Eliot—she said her favorite poet was Rod McKuen—but her archive sits at Smith, boxes and boxes of it, like a plaintive homage to Prufrock: “And how should I begin?”

  What she liked about her life story was its fairy-tale quality, though she always made it clear that she herself had never relied on a fairy godmother or, worse yet, settled down for a hundred-year nap expecting to still look good when the prince arrived. Sex and the Single Girl, published in 1962, became the template for all the versions of her story that would follow: she had been a young woman with nothing special about her by way of looks or money; she worked hard for many years to support herself while learning to become chic and alluring; and finally she walked off with the prize—a perfect husband. “David is a motion picture producer, forty-four, brainy, charming and sexy. . . . And I got him! We have two Mercedes-Benzes, one hundred acres of virgin forest near San Francisco, a Mediterranean house overlooking the Pacific, a full-time maid and a good life.” Unlike the Brothers Grimm, she put this happy ending on the first page of the book. Then she filled the rest of it with practical guidance, covering everything from how to take care of woolens (sponge the spots, never dry-clean) to whether or not it’s a good idea to husband-hunt at an AA meeting (doubtful, except in Beverly Hills). Sex and the Single Girl sold more than 150,000 copies in hardcover and more than a million in paperback; it was published in twenty-eight countries and translated into sixteen languages. Small wonder she wrote it again and again, and although none of her other books was as successful as the first, she didn’t need the sales. What she needed was to keep writing the book. And to keep telling the story, which she did in countless articles and interviews for nearly half a century—delivering anecdotes from her seventeen secretarial jobs, explaining the exercise schedule she maintained every morning of her life, discussing the pros and cons of having sex with somebody else’s husband, reflecting on what it was like to work and travel and socialize the way Helen Gurley Brown worked and traveled and socialized. “There’s nothing left inside Helen,” her husband remarked. “It all comes out.”