The reluctant spinster
Kay Dick
A Very Private Eye: the Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym Edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym (Macmillan £12.95) Aheart she was a Betjeman girl (`The tennis-playing, biking girl,The wholly- girl'), eager, enthusiastic, Jolly, jokey, a bit of a tomboy, tremendously interested in everything and everyone, and remained so, in spite of several severe knocks, essentially adapt- able and good-mannered, taking to novel- writing and spinsterhood when romance and lovers proved incompatible with com- fort and pride. Altogether, as the blurb of this autobiographical compendium states, MI 'excellent woman', Barbara Pym pub- lished ten quite delightful, slightly sinister, if light in tone, novels, and enjoyed, three Years before she died in 1980, a literary comeback following 16 years of neglect.
book, Very Private Eye is a loving, tender u°0k, a joyful compensation for those of us who did not have the pleasure of knowing her. Pleasure it must have been, because so evidently she was herself spectacularly °Pen to all the pleasures life placed in her a'y, although her natural commonsense d her that pleasures must sadly and often painfully be paid for. One does, of course, wonder what extracts were left out °f these diaries, notebooks and letters, uecause clearly omissions there must be: eertain passages suggest there were darker entries, possibly too grim to be printed — .this stage anyway. Marginal speculation `Its, yet one feels that the jolly girl must, Metaphorically, have bitten her fingernails during long night hours.
the Oxford clear divisions define this portrait: Oxford years, the war and the novelist. The prefaces give us some useful back- ground material. Barbara Pym was born on 2 June 1913. Her father was an Oswestry solicitor, himself the illegitimate son of a domestic servant, her mother an ironmon- ger's daughter. Her childhood was one of nannies, books, ponies, hens in the garden, church attendance (Barbara in later years was a devout Anglican); sugar-mice for Christmas and Gilbert and Sullivan. Bar- bara read English at St Hilda's- (1931), and there began the romance of her lifetime with an idealised elegant charmer, Henry Stanley Harvey (Lorenzo in the diary). There had been one chap before, Rupert, with whom first sex was experienced. Henry clearly enjoyed being courted, and in his fashion succumbed. One gets the impression that Barbara took him to bed rather than the other way round. She bought loads of new clothes to impress him, read to him in his bath, and had to endure his closest mate's cynical scrutiny — that of writer-to-be Robert Liddell, known as Jock. 'Putting a brave face on it' was a necessity; 'what a perilous thing happiness is'. It was a case of bonding Barbara's duck to Henry's swan. It was all so delicious, so youthful, so touching and tender. When Henry married, the word 'spinster' went into the diary. That was to be her chosen role, and to show her good nature she kept up a spirited corres- pondence with Henry's wife. Once she had nearly lost her temper: 'I am fed up with the whole business of writing gay, flippant letters to you to see that I didn't really feel that way.' After Henry there were other chaps. As war approaches she notes that 'everything that did happen and didn't quite happen and might still happen' was much on her mind.
As a Wren, working in naval censorship, she enjoyed foreign travel and jolly times with dashing naval officers, although a hint of disillusion creeps in. Then began her sad and unsatisfactory affair with Gordon Glover, a married man whose wife lodged with her children in the same house as Barbara. It was the spinster's encounter with a cad, and again she was the loser in the love game. One does wonder whether anyone fell in love with her. There was a fair amount of bouncy sex, much friendship (though not with Glover), yet no fully reciprocated love. She was now writing novels, for 'her 'the happiness' which was to replace the lack of passionate love. Her sadness becomes more out- spoken: 'I will fight for what I want and if I can't have it, then I will have nothing, but NOTHING.' The spinster self-image is now reinforced. She writes to Henry: 'It looks as though you and Jock may get your way and have me as Miss Pym all my life.'
So we come to the novelist earning her living at the International African Institute as an editor, settling down, to a shared household with her sister, first in London and later in the country — near Oxford, need one add? The first novels, declared literary by the critics, earned her some money without much help from the pub- lisher-, Cape. In the Sixties, Cape turned down the latest Barbara Pym as being out of fashion, and so she remained for 16 years, enduring refusal after refusal from Hamish Hamilton, Macdonald, Faber, Hodder, Longmans and Michael Joseph, to mention only a few who now should blush with shame. Even so, she went on writing and acquired her best fan in Philip Larkin, whose encouragement sustained and comforted her. It was Alan Maclean, at Macmillan, who had the flair and perception to take on Quartet in Autumn, which was short-listed for the Book- er, a nomination which ensured paper- backs and reprints — even from Cape. She was not one to bear grudges, and she enjoyed the fame of her last three years; nor was she overtly cynical, but her atti- tude was a trifle graver. There had been what might be described as a last love affair with a younger man called Richard: 'I must learn not to take "things" so much to heart and try to understand — don't stop loving (can't), just be there if and when needed.' Henry married again, and remained in touch; they drove to Greece together, a sweet last pain. He came to see her before she died. Never could those Oxford years be forgotten, nor any so cherished.
It is possible that her fiction• has been overestimated, since it was so underestim- ated for a time. She lived to know the score: 'Trying to understand people and leaving them alone and being "unselfish" and all that jazz has only the bleakest of rewards — precisely nothing.' Small won- der that her work has a sharp edge to it; she knew what it was like to be sorely wounded. She lived her life as fully as people made it possible for her, and she left behind ten delightful novels. A good . life, it could be so described, of a person open to joy and grief, and A Very Private Eye leaves us with admiration and affec- tion for Miss Pym the reluctant spinster.
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