1948. Mission meeting. Prayers are difficult when choir practice interrupts them – the organist making jokes. We pray for streets. ‘Warwick Square’, says the vicar, his tone seeming to gain in fullness.
In the vestry I look round with frank interest – two rows of chairs, a grand piano. An assortment of vases and bowls, a small brass crucifix in need of cleaning, rolls of Mission posters.
The conversation – the bishop’s letter is feeble, a pity says the vicar. People are so indifferent. Somebody suggests a procession, but people from the pubs might join in.
Worshipping in a Victorian church (St Gabriel’s, Warwick Square) – no nice monuments round the walls, but the brass tablets and the atmosphere of Victorian piety is in its way just as comforting.
The new vicar calling – saying a prayer with housewives in their aprons – or the fear that he might.
The electricity man comes – he has to duck among the swinging wet stockings and knickers, but the expression of his serious rather worried blue eyes does not change. He sings in the choir.
Whitsun 1949. Bristol revisited. Coffee at Lloyd’s (Carwardines). The comfortable atmosphere of a provincial town. It is this which evokes nostalgia rather than any memories.
Clifton on a June evening. Light on the Regency houses. Wistaria dying, poppies. But it hadn’t been like this during the war. Those twinkling lights everywhere and the door of The Rocks standing wide open and welcoming, light glowing in a moonlike globe. Then it had been a blue-shaded light inside the door hastily shut and weeping in the Ladies. And when we looked over the Suspension Bridge it was not into lights but the dark bowl of trees.
The angry, umbraged and hurt postcards coming from the Oxford anthropologists: ‘There seems to be no indication that I should get a copy’.
It is the only occasion when one really wants a husband – in a pub with uncongenial company and the feeling of not belonging.
St Michael’s Church, Minehead. Morning. Women are doing the flowers – huge dahlias. It smells of floor polish rather than incense.
Old screen and font with stone figures (one partially restored?) The suspicious church-crawler looking out, not for the genuinely old, but the restored.
Sunday 27 November. Tea at the Hope-Wallaces to meet Elizabeth Bowen. Present: EB and her husband Alan Cameron, Jacqueline Hope-Wallace, Philip H-W, Veronica Wedgwood, John Hope (young), old man with white beard, David King-Wood, Hilary and myself. Charming drawing room in little St John’s Wood house, first floor. Coral red curtains and turquoise walls – small Victorian chairs and ‘objects’ – but nothing new or Vogueish – a kind of cosy shabbiness. Elizabeth Bowen is in black with grey and black pearls and pretty ear-rings (little diamond balls). The young author in her nervousness talks rather too much about herself! EB discusses methods of working – better at a typewriter than curled up in an armchair. She is very kind and obviously feels she ought to know more about me than she can possibly know! Her stammer is not really as bad as I had expected. Veronica tells me that both Daniel George and William Plomer were in agreement over Some Tame Gazelle (apparently unusual) and think it very amusing.
Veronica had a relative who ‘passed over’. She was heard at a seance, saying in an unmistakable voice that she was ‘bitterly disappointed’.
Buying Christmas cards in Mowbrays – one feels one can’t push.
The way one betrays one’s old loves – getting the new one to read Trivia or Matthew Arnold, going to the same churchyard. When we are older there seems no new approach left. The disillusionment of finding out that something (say Trivia) has been his thing with someone else.
January 1950. Broomhall Lodge [staying with friends]. The distinction between animals’ and humans’ dishes is a very narrow one. One feels that when we aren’t there, there is no distinction.
Fasting before midnight mass. ‘Fr X told us to fast for 2 hours.’ ‘Oh but Fr Y told us 3 hours.’ ‘I only had a very light meal myself, just a boiled egg and some tea and I did eat a little fruit, but it was over by 7.45 at the latest, so really I was fasting for 4 1/4 hours.’
To Henry Harvey in Göttingen
47 Nassau Road
Barnes S.W.13
1 May 1950
Dear Henry,
Here is a copy of my book [Some Tame Gazelle] – published today – with the author’s compliments. I don’t know if it will amuse you but hope that perhaps it may. Please don’t notice all the places where I ought to have put commas – I am only too conscious of my shortcomings. There haven’t been any reviews yet. It doesn’t seem fair that people should have the power to criticise it!
I haven’t put any embarrassing inscription, so you can give it to somebody as a birthday present. I should never know.
Hope you are well,
With love – Barbara
Gordon Glover/Fabian. A Gordonish character in the village. His wife, to whom he had been consistently unfaithful, died – his outraged surprise and confusion of sentimental symbols.
‘The Chapel Minister has BSc after his name – I feel one gets really everything there.’
1951. It seems rather dangerous, after we have been praying for the unity of the churches, to have a hymn by Newman.
1 February 1952. King George VI’s Lying in State. 7.30-8.30 a.m. Very cold. The hall very dim, footsteps muffled on the thick carpet. The still figures guarding the catafalque – the nose and chin of the very young officer of the Household Cavalry so pink and smooth – eyes hidden. The faces of the Yeomen of the Guard – carved out of wood, lined and pale, one with a small moustache. The glitter of the diamonds in the crown and the white flowers on the coffin.
The vicar in the dark vicarage with a broken window, near to the yew-shaded churchyard. Lives with his mother – house said to be very dirty. Vicar has to be roused from his bed (? by an excellent woman) to take Communion Service.
Read some of Jane Austen’s last chapters and find out how she manages all the loose ends.
The Riviera Cafe, St Austell is decorated in shades of chocolate brown. Very tasteless, as are the cakes.
To Henry Harvey in Oxford
47 Nassau Road
27 March 1952
Dear Henry,
Many thanks for your letter. There is something irresistible about your finding an old letter of mine in a drawer and answering it! You mustn’t mind if I use the incident in a story one day. No, it didn’t really need an answer – it was rather a peevish letter as far as I remember. We were both young and stupid in those days [at Oxford] and I can see that I must have been just as trying in my way as you were. Goodness knows what I expected! Anyway, you can be quite sure that I don’t bear you any ill will about anything. I even look back on those days with a certain amount of pleasure – or do I mean emotion recollected in tranquillity, ‘Samson Agonistes’ and Langbaine and Jock being there and our quarrel – some excursions into the country.
Now we can have the satisfaction of being mean to each other – I by not giving you a copy of my new novel [Excellent Women] and you by not buying it. I wonder if you’d like it, anyway? I suppose every man I have ever known will see himself as Rocky (the rather shallow character). Doesn’t the British Council buy books?
You don’t say where you are living in Oxford, so I just imagine you in an office with a lot of filing cabinets and telephones. (Where would they file this letter if they did open it?)
I am glad you are going to be able to marry Susi [Henry and Elsie were divorced] now. I should think she has been very good for you and I do wish you both every happiness. Perhaps we shall meet one day – I should think it is inevitable and I shall have much pleasure in buying the young people a drink.
With best wishes,
Yours – Barbara
9 June. London Jazz Club. This is all very proper and formal, there is a kind of controlled enthusiasm. Unselfconscious. Pepsicola and cups of tea and a grey-haired woman collecting the empty cups. It is as respectable as a church youth club. No clergyman there, but a grey-haired man watching the dancers and holding his daughter’s handbag and cardigan – for he is the prospective father-in-law (we thought) of one of the young men in the band.
The agony of wondering if he will send a Christmas card! And he, wandering in his provincial town on Christmas Eve, as we used to do in Oswestry.
The Hadzapi will eat practically anything that is edible except the hyena.
The giving and receiving of off-prints brings about a special relationship between people.
1953. The young woman has just read a novel by Rosamond Lehmann about the suffering of women in love – it makes her feel inferior as if she isn’t capable of suffering so much. Perhaps when I’m older, she thinks hopefully.
‘Gone to Watford to talk about the lineage system,’ she said desperately. ‘It seems so, well, so unnecessary.’
Gems from Crockford:
de Blogue (formerly Blogg), Oswald, Wm. Chas.
The organist of Bristol Cathedral is called A. Surplice Esq.
24 June. Men don’t seem to like women in black – does it foreshadow their own death? Or do they think of Masha in The Seagull ‘in mourning for her life’ and fear that a long, dreary tale of an unsuccessful love is about to be unfolded?
Her eyes seemed to beg for a future meeting, but somehow he couldn’t suggest one. Instead he asked ‘Are you any good at typing?’
Professor Mainwaring had taught his students always to make carbon copies, use inverted commas round certain technical terms and, best of all, that thanks can never be too fulsome.
‘It is important that not even the slightest expression of amusement or disapproval should ever be displayed at the description of ridiculous, impossible or disgusting features in custom, cult or legend.’ Notes & Queries in Anthropology.
Reading a biography of Edmund Campion on a Friday over lunch one feels bound to eat fish.
Title for a Betjeman poem: Despair in the Protestant Truth Society Bookshop, 21st December 1953.
The Christmas card bore the head of a large dog – one of her least favourite animals and an inappropriate message – Kind Remembrances. Perhaps Tom does that to Catherine after they have parted. She almost hates him.
The unsuitable Confirmation presents – books chosen because they were small and in special bindings, e.g. A Shropshire Lad, The Rubaiyat, Shakespeare’s Sonnets – or even Latin poets like Catullus.
After Tom’s death, Elaine, who is staying with Tom’s sister, wants to meet Deirdre and Catherine for lunch (‘ He spoke so much of you’). What can they order – Braised heart, thought Catherine wildly. Should they drink? Ought they to feel hungry? Who would pay the bill? T’s sister, presumably. Deirdre and Catherine seemed to band together. Who had loved him the most? The nightmare quality of the talk.
For Deirdre it’s pass on quickly to the next one (Digby), as it should be. Deirdre had put on rather more make-up than usual, had painted dark, fierce eyebrows – so they would get quite the wrong impression – a tall, thin, rather fierce looking girl, with her hair scraped back in a kind of tail.
Geography learned the hard way by bitter experience on the edge of tears.
But are Christians always and necessarily pleasant people? Who could like the Wise Virgins in the Bible, for example? Is that one of the trials of it all – that one must be prepared to be disliked?
Catherine goes round the back of a Holborn church (St Alban the Martyr). V. strong smell of incense – candles 3d. each. Outside two ladies sitting by a small bowl electric fire on an upturned box talking about the vicar.
Woman like a Henry Moore figure. Tom’s mother in the garden?
The viol, the violet and the vine … it sounded like – but could he possibly have preached on that text?
How irresponsible of Professor Monod to go down in M. Cousteau’s bathyscope instead of coming to the I.A. I. meeting.
1954. One woman rings up to enquire about a man friend at his office and is answered by another woman, who gives her full details of his symptoms etc. ‘He is taking anti-biotic…’
At the same table in Hill’s a man and a woman, middle-aged perhaps working in the same office, are having a fascinating conversation about immersion heaters.
To Bob Smith
47 Nassau Road
22 April 1954
Dear Bob,
I had a letter from Jock recently. He liked Jane and Prudence very much. But the Americans and Continentals most definitely don’t and now I am feeling a little bruised! In answer to my enquiries Cape tells me that 8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and ‘declined’ (that seems to be the word) Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with J. & P. So humble yourself, Miss Pym, and do not give yourself airs.
Best wishes and love,
Barbara
I look out of the window of the Kardomah and see a pale, moony youth, though with a rather sullen expression, selling a newspaper – Individual Action – Anarchist Publication – in huge letters on a poster.
September. Portugal. The fluty, well-bred English voices in the Portuguese bus – rising above the chatter of the natives – talk even of Harrods. And ‘Everything’s so clean – spotless. The people are so obliging.’ The advantages of holidaying in a feudal country.
7 September. The Englishwoman (about 50) is almost aggressively sunburnt, displays her rather scraggy neck and chest in a low-cut cotton dress. She sits on a canvas chair, wearing sunglasses and a scarf on her head, meditatively picking the skin off her nose which is peeling. NB. This is me, on the last morning at Foz do Arelho.
Driving through the Portuguese villages one notices and comments (British reaction) on some irrelevant things, objects like a run-over cat or dog lying on the dusty road.
Lisbon, Hotel Metropole. Near the Moorish style railway station. Dark little room looking into a well. I can see them washing up at 11 o’clock at night. The lower part of the walls covered with striped canvas like luggage (it’s like living in a suitcase), the dim light and the grey iron bedstead like a French film. Setting for a Graham Greene novel.
Estoril is very like Bournemouth except that the beach is much smaller. On the promenade sits an old man with a stall of secondhand objects. Some of the jewellery, rings, etc must surely have belonged to exiled royally.
I cannot reach up to pluck the prickly balls of a plane tree. Once it might have looked young, charming and gay, now only middle-aged and eccentric.
5 October. This afternoon I painted streaks in my hair with process white; later blew up a paper bag and popped it. It made a splendid noise.
On the 26th of June 1905 (according to the tablet which I can see when I peer down the steps) the men’s convenience in the middle of Fleet Street, crossing over to Fetter Lane, was opened.
Since reading Maiden Voyage (when I was in Portugal) and the Journal I have been besotted with Denton Welch – am collecting and reading everything.
10 October. Today finished my fourth novel, about the anthropologists (no title as yet). Typed from 10.30 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. sustained by, in the following order, a cup of milky Nescafé, a gin and French, cold beef, baked potato, tomato and grated cheese, rice pudding and plums.
In a love affair it comes as something of a shock to a woman to realise that the man does not of necessity feel that everything about her is delightful (the long Victorian ear-rings with the old raincoat).
To receive a love letter and to be eating honey on a June morning (in a bed-sitting room in London). This was in 1939 – me in Upper Berkeley Street. The letter was from Jay and the honey from Jock (Miel d’Hymette) from Athens.
28 October. Lovely warm, windy morning. Rushing exuberantly into a Whitechapel train which seems to have a kind of glamour.
Perhaps to be loved is the most cosy thing in life and yet many people, women I suppose I mean, know only the uncertainties of loving, which is only sometimes cosy when one accepts one’s situation (rarely perhaps).
18 November. At lunchtime went into Zwemmers Gallery to see some pottery by Picasso and lithographs by various people. I must have had a distressed look on my face for the man in charge (dark, youngish) told me I could take the price list round and then himself accompanied me round the exhibits. Perhaps he was cold and wanted to stretch his legs. Anyway he was very charming and paid me the compliment of treating me like a person who could afford to buy something. Then a man with a beard came in and he was much bolder than the rest of us and lifted the lid off a great soup tureen with a bold gesture. I shouldn’t have dared. There was a wonderful big blue pottery duck, priced £80.
‘I thought that Flotum made out that Mbum was a Bantu language,’ said A.N. T. ‘Oh he didn’t try anything of that sort with me,’ said M.B. indignantly.
31 December. Had lunch with Edward Gardner at the Olde Cocke Taverne – hadn’t seen him for 20 years. This makes me feel like Prudence, as when I have lunch with married men contemporaries. With the years men get more bumbling and vague, but women get sharper.
29 March 1955. Today I am cross with D.F. and ‘rebellious’ but I just have a poached egg at the Kardomah (but a chocolate biscuit with my stewed apple) then go to Bourne and Hollingsworth and Dolcis and don’t hurry back, yet I am back again by 2.20. Then I write in this little book.
At St Mary Aldermary (Canon Freddie Hood’s church) one hears the shrill whirr of the telephone through the organ music.
From a bus in the Strand I see someone from Oxford days, looking very much the same, red in the face, hair only slightly touched with grey, a little stooping. He goes into Yate’s Wine Lodge. Then I seem to remember hearing that he had not done well, been a disappointment, perhaps, even, taken to drink. (Did this occur to me after I had seen him enter the Wine Lodge or was the thought already in my mind?)
30 April. At the Women’s University Settlement I see Miss Casson wearing a dress that I sent to their jumble sale some time ago – and very nice it looks. Bob and I have lunch and then walk in the park among the young green trees but he feels that Nature is not enough so we go into the Church of the Annunciation at Marble Arch – so near the Cumberland Hotel. Lofty but impressive with the lingering smell of incense. Fine red brocade-covered sedilia and a marble side-table – did the vicar bring them back from Italy? As we are standing there Bob says ‘Oh I wish I were still in the Church of England’.
4 May. I give blood in the crypt of St. Martin in the Fields. The donors are all rather ordinary-looking people – the women burdened by shopping baskets. I can imagine (for a novel) a little, frail laden woman saying ‘Oh I have given blood’ and putting others to shame. My right arm aches so that I can hardly write – is there any connection, I wonder?
5 May. The knowledge might come to me – and I dare say it would be a shock – that one wasn’t a particularly nice person (selfish, unsociable, uncharitable, malicious even).
15 May. I went to All Saints Notting Hill with Bob to High Mass. On the way we passed Westbourne Grove Baptist Church and heard records of hymns blaring out. How trying to live opposite! It would surely work on one’s conscience to be lying in bed when such music was going on. All Saints is splendidly Catholic – 3 priests. Sean MacAteer (whom I know) was the celebrant. We began with Asperges (later at tea Hilary asked what was the connection between Asperges and asparagus). The three priests in their lime green vestments with bands and birettas look like dolls bobbing up and down. Fr Twisaday, the vicar, is an elderly dried up celibate, irritable and tetchy. He fidgets in the pulpit, times things alarmingly with pauses so that one wonders if he’s just forgotten what he was going to say and will fall down in a fit. The sermon, urging us to keep Ascension Day as a day of obligation, was quite good. Then he remembered a notice about a meeting in the Albert Hall and began talking about that, all mixed up – how many tickets to send for, etc. Apparently he lives in a large vicarage with a private oratory – the only telephone is there and he doesn’t like the curates being rung up.
WHAT IS MY NEXT NOVEL TO BE? It can begin with the shrilling of the telephone in Freddie Hood’s church and end with the flame springing up – the new fire on Easter Saturday in the dark church. Hope and a blaze of golden forsythia round the font. But what about the middle?
When starting to tell a story you have to choose exactly the point to plunge in. Perhaps on a fine Spring afternoon at the induction of a new vicar – ‘We had had an early lunch.…’
20 May. With Bill H. of Twentieth Century Fox to see a play at the Polish Candlelight Club in Chepstow Villas. The Polish lady apologises because the Ladies cloakroom isn’t very nice – but I want to say ‘Oh but it’s splendid!’
Falling in love takes away spontaneity because you’re always thinking of things to say or write.
‘You never asked about my furniture,’ he said.
‘No, there seemed so many other things to talk about.’
(They all come before her in her imagination – but in his is only a wardrobe or a table.)
‘I am no longer convinced of the validity of Anglican orders,’ he said rather stiffly – and, indeed, how else could he have said it for it was not a cosy subject – the approach to the door in Farm Street on a cold Winter evening.
2 July. Back at my own church, on a cool greeny-grey English Sunday. We start with a George Herbert hymn – ‘King of Glory, King of Peace’ – very English, like a damp overgrown churchyard. What different conceptions one could have of God according to the country one was in – those sun-baked cemeteries in Marseilles.
He had solved the problem of how to end the letter by putting ‘Yours in haste’. I was astonished – I could not imagine such a thing.
15 July. Went into St Alban’s Holborn mainly because I was frustrated at not getting a lettuce in Leather Lane market and it seemed a cool and quiet place. Inside the candles burn to St Alban – big ones. I lit one and put money in the box (like Denton). Over the confessional which has purple curtains, a violet coloured stole is flung. Outside the church is a courtyard, round which are the Stations of the Cross, with a seat where I sit and read the parish magazine. Don’t quite like to smoke or read Proust.
20 August. Saw today: a woman with bright purple hair, her expression under it all understandably surprised; two well-dressed upper-class women, chinless; an elderly fragile clergyman and his wife, arm-in-arm, she with the remains of elegance. When the Winter comes we can read Denton again. October to March are his months.
24 August. Saw today a nun coming out of a telephone box. An early Betjeman – Mount Zion in touch with the Infinite.
8 September. In the office 3.55 p.m. Even at this moment some dreadful thing may be happening – a husband deciding to leave his wife, a love affair being broken, somebody dying, languishing with hopeless love or quarrelling about the Church of South India in the Edgware Road as I nearly did with Bob on Sunday. And I sit typing, revising and ‘translating’ Harold Gunn’s ms [changing the American spelling], waiting for tea.
13 October. To the Proust exhibition with Bob – a rather reverent atmosphere – odd-looking, peering women. How Marcel must have driven his printers mad with all his corrections! Many photographs and portraits. Scott-Moncrieff looks not at all as I had imagined – a rather round-faced young man in uniform with tartan trews.
15 October. In the train going to East Croydon. Rereading all of Denton now, beginning with Maiden Voyage. ‘Nothing could be gayer than a red lacquer coffin,’ he says (p. 152). Oh darling Denton…
Less Than Angels out on Monday. Rather dreaded. Denton says (p.195) ‘I thought how nice it would be to have burnt sacrifices offered to me when I was dead.’
21 October. Reading In Youth is Pleasure. D’s favourite adjective is ‘charming’.
25 October. Went for a walk along the river with Bob – from Hammersmith Bridge along towards Putney, past Harrod’s Furniture Depository. It is vast when you get up to it, pinky brown brick and ‘Grinling Gibbons’ decorations, swags of fruit etc. Many blank, blind-looking windows, some a little open. Inside what! One likes to imagine acres of decaying furniture riddled with woodworm and white ants. Great trunks of musty clothes. I suggested furniture brought back from India in 1912 for which the owner had never had a flat big enough. Nearby is a building that looks like a kind of chapel and, of course, the Turkish domes of the main building. Down the front white marks. Bird droppings? We know about the Dominion of the Birds.
I noticed in church last Sunday how young some hymn writers die.
3 November. Evening out with Bill H. pub visiting. Standing with feet hurting a little at bars, one all mirrors and mahogany and happy little queer couples – another semi-Moorish in decor in Leicester Square wedged in between two cinemas.
It was to have been an evening of seduction (?) in the office over the Rialto cinema, the room lit by the pinky glow from the neon signs outside. A balcony with an interesting view – packed humanity round Lyons and the Prince of Wales Theatre. But it didn’t turn out quite as he wished. How hungry I was eating ham sandwiches, why don’t men think of eating more? Then I wanted to go to the lavatory I but the cloakroom was on another floor and had to be unlocked and I we couldn’t find the right keys! Got the mortice key stuck in the lock. All the time I was striking matches and feeling more and more uncomfortable. But there was such a strong element of farce that one couldn’t help laughing! Eventually to a pub in Rupert Street (The Blue Posts) where the landlord preceded me up the stairs apologising for not very good provision for Ladies Toilet. It was a large room with a big mirror over the mantelpiece and tables with chairs piled on them. The kind of room that might be used for a meeting. In a corner and up some steps the door leading to ‘the toilet’. Quite adequate! Why are people always apologising to me for such things when one wants only the bare essentials.
December. Feast of St Barbara. I began talking about my novels, whether I should go on writing about the clergy etc. Then it occurred to me what a bore I was being and I had the idea of a young man walking with the elderly female novelist, worrying about the gathering darkness and the park closing and should he take her to tea at Stewart’s or the Marble Arch Corner House or would it be sherry time or what?
On TV I thought that women have never been more terrifying than they are now – the curled head (‘Italian style’), the paint and the jewellery, the exposed bosom – no wonder men turn to other men sometimes.
Shrove Tuesday and St Valentine 1956. Back at the office ‘better’. On these occasions and perhaps on occasions of unhappiness too one might unburden oneself to one’s hairdresser and enjoy the cosiness of non-intellectual conversation. Wilmet can do this when Piers has been unkind. Hilary was told by a woman whose daughter was having trouble with her husband, ‘You see we have discovered that he is a sodomist.’ How dreadful it sounds in a full plummy tone or dark and hushed.
31 May. Corpus Christi. Benediction and procession at All Saints with Bob. It was advertised in The Church Times – priests were asked to wear chasubles (?) and ‘plain cottas’. Afterwards in the church hall we met Sean MacAteer. He has charm, wrinkles his nose when he smiles. Such a display of charm is surprising, even a little shocking. Later when we are in a pub, Fr James comes in with the thurifer.
Endings: Fr Bode beaming through his spectacles and saying ‘Oh but you mustn’t leave us – there’s the bazaar, the outing to Runnymede, and the party to welcome Fr —.’
21 September. Greenwich. 34 Croom’s Hill where Denton lived. It stands back a little between 32 and 36 – square and flat with a nice front door and fanlight. Three floors, white painted windows, dull red brick, net half-curtains. Green plant (azalea?) in upper window. Tiny patch of rather bald grass in front with dustbins. I sat down on the low stone wall opposite by the park with my umbrella up for it was raining and gazed for a few minutes, but I saw nobody.
5 October. Headline in Daily Mirror. Secret Love of Vanished Vicar (splendid hymn metre).
All over The Times and Telegraph ladies (often titled) are forced to sacrifice their minks – sometimes ‘going abroad’ – the picture it conjures up – one wonders.
January 1957. One talks so gaily about ‘old loves’, but there comes a time when they really are old.
August. At a writers’ conference at Swanwick. It really makes one despair when someone gets up and asks if publishers like chapters to be all the same length.
Meet a man who has ‘an amorphous mass’ of humorous material and a big shapeless novel that can’t be controlled.
Dulcie could make some kind of shopping list which might have on it ‘Husband for Viola’.
26 October. Staying with Ailsa. In the afternoon we went in the car on a Denton pilgrimage. It was a fine but sunless afternoon, the sky grey-white. Many lovely beech trees in autumn colours – carpets of leaves in the woods. We went through Plaxol to Crouch – notice a pub, the Rose and Crown. Crouch is a straggling village with apple orchards. We drove on then came to a board saying Middle Orchard on the right. There were two houses, one near the road. You go down a short grassy lane, bumpy, to get to Middle Orchard. It is a clapboard house, white (with grey and black) with a balcony on the side nearest the road. Two men were working in the garden or orchard between the two houses. We didn’t speak to anyone.
Mr Neale (OUP) entertained Mrs Wyatt, Carol Robson and BP to lunch today. Mrs R. is rather beautiful but nails not quite worthy.
When the woman’s daughter (who had divorced and remarried) came to tea with her new husband, the mother shows her disappointment by not making any fresh cakes and giving them ‘just a bit of sponge and some biscuits’.
Dreadful scene in library. Viola and Aylwin overheard by Dulcie and Miss Foy. He is talking in a Henry Jamesian way ‘There is – as it were – somebody else’. Can it be me? Dulcie wonders, almost in dread, but it is Laurel.
8 April 1958. How would she eat when alone? Half a lobster and a glass of Chablis at Scott’s – or baked beans on toast and Coca Cola in the Kenbar at Barkers?
29 April. Last week we went down to the little room (at the I.A.I.), DF, Mrs Nadel and I and opened the trunks of the late Professor S. F. Nadel. In the top of the trunks brightly coloured African rugs or hangings – underneath the notebooks tidily packed. Notes neatly annotated and indexed but some in German shorthand. Even Mrs Nadel cannot read them now.
Sunday morning early. Two strange people in church in front of me. He in a hand-knitted ‘Norwegian’ pullover, she in a raincoat with tartan-lined hood and black lace mantilla. Both with rather new-looking English missals.
A Glass of Blessings published on 14 April. Only 3 reviews up to 29 April, none wholly good. My humour deserts me when I am dealing with romance, I am tone-deaf to dialogue, am moderately amusing. Reviewers all women. Young?
17 May. A station wagon draws up outside the home of the Siamese diplomats next door and out get two Buddhist priests in orange robes. We wait to see them leave – two of the servants come out and a basket, obviously containing food and drink is put in the car. Later the priests themselves come out and are driven away by the (English) chauffeur. I wonder if the appearance of two English clergymen would arouse such interest in the suburbs of Bangkok.
15 June. Wellington House Lydden. Fête on the Saturday, washing up at the back of the tea marquee among rank nettles and elder bushes. By my bed Honor has put Memorials of Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-1879). How almost enviable were the lives of those Victorian lady hymn writers – the leisurely travel abroad, faith and purpose in life. In her study ‘her American typewriter’, her ‘harp-piano’ at which she composed hymns. Somebody had given her ‘A Journal of Mercies’ in which every day she noted down the particular mercy she had received.
Young man from the Clarendon Press. Low Church Anglican, plays cricket, likes chess, bumbling. Married with wife who looks very like him – untidy curling hair.
12 May 1959. The telephone wakes me up ringing – it is 1 a.m. It goes on and on but I don’t answer it. It could be the stolid unimaginative persistence of a wrong number or the sly voice of a ‘nasty’ caller. In a book it might be an inconsiderate woman friend. Young man sitting opposite to me has 3 sausage rolls, a roll, baked beans and chips. Not a very well balanced meal for a hot day. In the little Lyons it’s cool and dark with the air conditioning.
In the Buttery reading old Tatlers: ‘sincere and reverent ceremony’ – describing a society wedding – so one would hope!
January 1960. Evensong and Benediction in a N. London church, rather sparsely attended. The young man in the college scarf looking for he knows not what and fleeing when he is offered tea in the Church Hall afterwards, or an older man who has lost his faith coming out of nostalgia and perhaps the memory of a beautiful server or acolyte.
4 February. Going to the vet in Lancaster Gate to fetch Tati. Waiting room has large table with copies of The Field and Country Life. Round the walls photographs of grateful patients, some with their owners! The whole place slightly shabby as if the animals have made it so. Disconcerting cat’s cry from the cattery. Where is it? One is not allowed to see the animals. The vet’s assistant is almost excessively reassuring, more so than a human doctor, as if he expects tears, even hysterics, which they must often get.
Laurie Fleming stays at home with his mother – does the flowers beautifully – Is it now the unmarried son who does this?
In the church one of the servers appears with startlingly golden hair – curls falling over his eyes give him an air of sickly Victorian piety.
To Bob Smith in Ibodan
40 Brooksville Avenue
21 October 1960
Dearest Bob,
This morning I had the proofs of my new book which is called No Fond Return of Love, the title they made me have instead of A Thankless Task. My heart sinks rather as I open the book and begin reading – who can enjoy it? I wonder. Why isn’t it much better? Then I look over some of the bits I like to cheer me up. Hazel is going to correct the proofs for me. They say it will come out in the spring.
Love,
Barbara
St Valentine’s Day. In the flower shop at Ludgate Circus – a queue of people – but they are all women!
[This is the first letter to Philip Larkin, who had written to suggest that he might write a review article about her next novel when it was published.]
40 Brooksville Avenue
1 March 1961
Dear Mr Larkin,
Thank you very much for your letter. I was very pleased and flattered to think that you should have had the idea of writing an essay on my books and am grateful to you for telling me about it, even though it was too late to do it. Perhaps, if you still feel like doing it, I could let you know when my next is ready – (so far only four chapters written). It will be my seventh which seems a significant number.
N.F.R.L. (originally called A Thankless Task!) has had a better reception than I thought it would have, and your letter certainly encourages me to go on.
Yours sincerely,
Barbara Pym
1 March. Soup, jelly and bread and butter – that’s not much of a meal for a man I think as I sit in the Kardomah.
8 March. Sophia finds an exquisite piece of claw sheath, like mother of pearl, in the cat’s basket.
11 April 1961. Rome. Fr John Francis Gordon knocks back a Tio Pepe at the bar while we wait to be called for our flight. He also buys up all the little bottles of brandy on the plane – but he is nice (and Irish). Many nuns waiting at Leonardo da Vinci airport waving handkerchiefs and with bunches of flowers to welcome back a Mother Superior – we are surrounded by them. Near the hotel an illuminated sign shines continuously in the night BANCO SANTO SPIRITO (on a par with TAKE COURAGE).
Rome I.A.I. Meeting [meeting of the I. A.I. Executive Council]. Lunch at Roxy Cinema Café (which is very good) then I had a short siesta while Ailsa went to the Officers’ Meeting. The first Reunion was at 6. A strange collection of people most of them carrying or wearing raincoats. I felt like Prudence, overdressed in cream Courtelle and a pink and white striped carnation from the spray sent to us by the Tourist Bureau. Then we all moved over to the Ritz for the ‘informal reunion’ – walls covered with pleated silk, gold plush sofas and chairs, pictures of Roman emperors – a strange decor. Plenty of drinks and canapés. Then a very slow dinner at the Hotel Sporting with DF, Evelyn Forde, Kenneth Robinson and Ailsa. Afterwards for a drink in the bar at the underground station – v. draughty, loud juke box. The Chairman [Gouverneur Mueller] is seen approaching – a bored figure in a Homburg hat, his luggage being carried. He joins us. A strange setting altogether.
13 April. Meeting 9.30 to 12.45 p.m. Then lunch at Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘too much wine and too much marble’ as Contessa Grottanelli said. Each lady had a red rose by her plate and Mel Herskovits told me how he mixed tobacco in a great bowl.
14 April. After the Lugard Lecture we went to a cocktail party at the Grottanelli’s flat, high up in a rather squalid building in Largo Arenula. Crossing over the square we went underground and saw the thin cats (mostly grey tabby or tortoiseshell) which are said to be fed by elderly ladies. At the party, as we were leaving, a nice glimpse of Vinigi in his study, handing out offprints of an article to admiring Africans. Then a strange dinner with Ailsa, Lucy Mair, Kenneth Robinson and Nana Nketsia at Checco. Much Chianti. Back in N. Nk’s large Ghana Embassy car and the first glimpse of the Spanish Steps massed with red, pink and white azaleas.
20 April. To Amalfi and then went to Ravello on the bus. Acres of lemon groves all covered with matting and branches so that you don’t see them until you are close to. It is for the lemon groves that one loves Italy – also for oranges with stalks and leaves still on them and the little bundles of dried lemon leaves which you unwrap to reveal a few delicious lemon-flavoured raisins in the middle. The cathedral at Ravello – pulpit supported by lions of marble, walking, their legs going forward. Also in the garden of the Villa Rifolo a little marble lion licking its cub.
The Church ought to have a lot of summer festivals – Corpus Christi or St Peter and St Paul would do – so that we can have an evening mass with lots of incense, all doors open and hymns with soppy words and Romish tunes.
The new Archbishop of Canterbury has a lovely lap for a cat.
A rather rich lunch hour in St Paul’s churchyard. All the people sitting on seats with lunch, knitting etc, raising their faces to the mild September sun. I go round to the back where the pieces of broken marble are – it is all white and beautiful, looks good enough to eat – broken off bits of friezes and urn stands. In the middle of such a pile, as if on the rocks at the sea-side sits a woman (middle-aged of course) drinking tea from a plastic cup, the traffic swirling in front of her. I pass the mulberry tree, but it is too late for there to be squashed mulberries on the pavement. Coming round the other side and down by the shops I go to the secondhand bookshop. There is a band playing on the steps of St Paul’s which can be heard in the shop. It is a boy’s band and they play the Pilgrims’ Chorus from Tannhäuser at which point inconsequential conversation starts in the shop between the owner and a woman about dogs/cats. As I go out the band plays ‘Land of Hope and Glory!’ Surely something for me here. John and Ianthe in the churchyard and Rupert and Penelope hearing the band?
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
23 September 1961
Dear Mr Larkin,
When I had your letter it seemed impossible that I should ever get on with another novel, but now I am nearly half-way through and the last part is usually quicker than the first, so perhaps I shall finish something by the spring. Then, if it ever gets to the stage of proof copies, I’ll ask my publisher to send you one, so that you can decide if you’d like to do anything about it. But even if you don’t I should like you to have it because you seem to like – or at least to understand – poor Wilmet and Keith. I think incubus or familiar describes him well. I’m considering what you said about bringing characters from one’s earlier books into later ones and I agree that one does have to be careful. It can be a tiresome affectation. With me it’s sometimes laziness – if I need a casual clergyman or anthropologist I just take one from an earlier book. Perhaps really one should take such a very minor character that only the author recognises it, like a kind of superstition or a charm.
Yours sincerely,
Barbara Pym
40 Brooksville Avenue
15 October 1961
Dear Mr Larkin,
Your novel I liked was called A Girl in Winter, but written quite a long time ago, I think? Did you write any more and why didn’t you go on being a novelist? Because you preferred to be a poet or other things pressed too heavily? I apologise for this string of questions. Today my sister was tidying her desk and the old photograph albums reminded me of that lovely poem of yours.
My novel goes on, but slowly, so probably all the Literary Editors (why do I give them capital letters?) will have changed or died by the time it is in proof so you can relax for about a year and not think too much of what may have been a rash suggestion on your part (though I am still pleased at the thought of it!). Unfortunately I am the Assistant Editor of Africa, though I quite enjoy it, and I also have to see all the books we publish through the press. The only thing is that it takes too much time and energy. A pity one has to earn one’s living – why isn’t there a fund for middle-aged writers to have a year off to write a novel! No – Hull has no anthropology department, so I shouldn’t think you’d take Africa. Incidentally I have never been to Africa, nor have I a degree in Anthropology, but I know the jargon now – as esoteric as the terminology of jazz!
Yours sincerely,
Barbara Pym
40 Brooksville Avenue
11 December 1961
Dear Mr Larkin,
The novel is getting on – no title yet, of course, and none of the splendid collection I have seems to fit it. Now I have to force myself to type some of the earlier chapters because that’s the only way I can tell what it’s going to be like – whether it is worth going on, and all those other depressing thoughts that come. But I can see now that it will get finished if I am spared. No – nobody has ever written about the ‘art’ of my books – sometimes they have been well reviewed – other times not at all. Excellent Women was best received – A Glass of Blessings worst!
I can’t imagine you writing anything ‘knowing and smart’ (not even Jazz) so it must be only your own harsh self criticism – of course being so young when you wrote it, it would certainly be different from what you’d write now. Perhaps it is better not to publish anything before one’s thirty – I mean novels. I wrote Some Tame Gazelle when I was 22. Then rewrote it about ten years later.
I don’t think you are a 500-words-a-day-on-the-Riviera sort of writer – perhaps nobody is now. What would one do for the rest of the day, having spent the morning writing? Lead a worthless life, I suppose, and how pleasant it might be for a bit. Then one would get involved with the English church – there would be no escape.
Yours sincerely,
Barbara Pym
40 Brooksville Avenue
25 February 1962
Dear Mr Larkin,
Thank you for your letter which gave me the rather disquieting picture of you sitting, pen-in-hand – before a daunting pile of my novels. You will be relieved to hear that progress on the seventh is very slow, but perhaps sure – I sometimes wonder. In any case, I don’t think I’ve written to you since seeing your very charming tribute in the Guardian which gave me so much pleasure that it really absolves you from doing anything else.
If you feel like asking me anything about my ‘works’ please do – the less great are probably far more explicit than the great, so it wouldn’t be like asking Mary McCarthy. On the other hand it is often better not to know things. I liked a poem of yours in the Listener some weeks ago – one rather puzzling line, but poets are not to be asked to explain why and how.
The Geography of Communication – sounds like a poem – I will look out for it – not, I think, on my station bookstall, which has lurid paperbacks, women’s magazines and an occasional surprise like The Times Ed. Sup., but perhaps at Paddington. OUP publishes our books too – we have a sort of joking relationship with them.
Yours,
B.P.
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
40 Brooksville Avenue
9 March 1962
Dearest Bob,
Excuse this Institute paper, but Friday afternoon seems a good time to write to you, as I make it a rule never to do anything that may upset me for the weekend and so like to put Africa and our irritating authors out of my mind.
We are now in the throes of Lent at St L’s, as you may imagine – Imposition of Ashes on Wednesday evening – Stations of the Cross tonight. I hope you are getting some of these things. Lent must seem odd in the tropics, but no doubt you are used to it by now. Hazel thought somebody might have a bouillabaisse flown over from Marseilles for Ash Wednesday. But fish and chips in Lyons was perhaps more of a deprivation.
St Barnabas Pimlico: I have only been there once to the wedding of an anthropologist friend (Ioan Lewis who married the daughter of the Master of Balliol whom he met at a bus stop). The church I used to go to when we lived there was St Gabriel’s, Warwick Sq., the model of the church in Excellent Women, really.
Much love,
Barbara
For my next – the middle-aged, or elderly novelist and the young man who admires her and is taken in by her.
Sister Dew would lower her voice and talk of ‘a very big operation’, meaning, of course, something female. Men were somehow rendered inferior by this.
22 March 1962. In Gamage’s basement I buy (for 1/–) a little Italian bowl with a lemon and leaves painted inside it. It really pleases me, although it is chipped and I begin to wonder if I am getting to the stage when objects could please more than people or (specifically) men.
A woman living in the country who has had a hopeless love for a man (wife still living perhaps or religious scruples), then, when he is free she finds that after all he means nothing to her – is this the reward of virtue, this nothingness? Or an enviable calm – (He then, presumably, goes and marries a young girl).
Mervyn’s general dislike of books and reading (commoner than one supposes in a librarian) should be emphasised.
An old woman living in a village with her two husbands (a modern instance of polyandry) one divorced – but, poor thing, unable to cope on his own.
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
I.A.I.
15 June 1962
Dearest Bob,
I am glad you have got the Ife lectureship, though I could really wish you had got a job in England again. The other evening (Thursday late shop-opening) I emerged exhausted from Marks and Spencers wondering where on earth I could go to sit down (without having to order a Wimpy or anything like that) and suddenly thought of All Saints Margaret Street, which-turned out to be deliciously cool and restful and only one lady there – no violet-stoled priests lurking to force Anglican ladies to make their Confessions. (That sounds like one of Mr Kensit’s pamphlets in the Protestant Truth Society, doesn’t it.)
The P.C.s [the vicar of St Lawrence’s and his wife] are on holiday and have done an exchange with Fr Francis Ibbott from Norfolk. He has come to the vicarage with his house-keeper whom he acquired in Luton. He is rather nice and sings splendidly. The P.C. s apparently locked up their bedroom and the study. Wouldn’t you think that a bit odd, if you were the exchanging clergyman – as if they didn’t trust you? Or is that naive of me?
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
13 October 1962
Dearest Bob,
Hilary has just slipped along to the Jumble Sale at St Ann’s Hall. She was curious to see their hall and also thought she might pick up a bit of Fabergé or something. We haven’t seen Richard Roberts (met with me in summer 1962) again yet as he is still away. We did like him so much and hope to see him again.
The Yoruba is out of print but being reprinted – in the meantime I have sent you by seamail (on Friday) a spare copy of my own. Of course it is a mere summary and rather inadequate now, though it gives one some idea. It contains some of Miss Pym’s earliest work though you might not think so from her later writings. How nice of you to want my new novel – a few people do, I think, though not really enough. I asked Wren Howard [at Cape] about paperbacks and Penguins and he said they had tried but without success to get my books done so perhaps it is true what I heard that you must have sold ten thousand in hard covers before the paperback people will consider taking a book. Incidentally Jock is wrong about Daniel George having left Cape – he is still there in his little back room, I’m glad to say. I have tried to read T. Shandy and it is the sort of book I should like to like but all that really appeals to me is that marbled page and the blank page – which vary in beauty acording to what edition you have. Perhaps it could be a book for old age.
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
15 December 1962
Dearest Bob,
I thought, surging through Smith’s in Fleet Street today, ‘I’m just a tired-looking middle-aged woman to all those (mostly young) people, yet I have had quite a life and written (or rather published) six novels which have been praised in the highest circles.’ Did I tell you (I think not?) that I had a farming letter from Lady David Cecil (Rachel, daughter of the late Desmond MacCarthy) saying how much she had enjoyed No Fond Return? Did you ever read her book, Theresa’s Choice – a delicious portrait of Lord D. and her other suitors.
My next is getting on, quite flowing now. I am at the depressed stage when I begin to type out some of the early chapters and think that not much of it will do – I can only hope that I will get through this stage, but my first four chapters always seem so dragged out, even when I rewrite the beginning. It is nice of you to have wanted a new BP for Christmas. Angus Wilson has got to look very old, I think, a ruby-coloured face and cloud of snow white hair, not at all as he used to look. I heard him give a lecture on ‘Evil in the English Novel’ at University College – very good, as a matter of fact.
I had Evelyn Waugh’s life of R. Knox (out of the splendid public library on the way home) and thought what a pity it was he ever went over to Rome and how beastly it must be for a priest to do it and become a Roman priest.
Love,
Barbara
I.A.I.
11 January 1963
Dearest Bob,
I am writing this in the office on a Friday afternoon, surrounded by the raw material for the April Africa, the proofs of various books, and a shopping bag containing tins of cat food, frozen fish cakes, packet soups etc.
The first thing you wanted to know was about Richard and Jock. The latter had told me of meeting R and his friend, he thought they were nice but rather overawed by Elizabeth Taylor, who was there at the time. Richard dined with us at the end of November so we got a fuller picture from him of the ‘literati’ who flock to see Jock. He thought Elizabeth seemed very bored, but knowing her I should say it was her usual manner which conceals her shyness. Hilary and I are very fond of Richard – we dined with him in December – we met Maurice Quick, a nice young man called John something, and a young Siamese action painter just over here and it was all very cosy. Now Richard is in Nassau with his parents and is, I believe, intending to go to Mexico. He sent us a very pagan Christmas card and also a beautiful postcard from Nassau.
I have finished my novel and Hazel has read it in MS, but we are still struggling to find a title. It should really be called The Canon’s Daughter or An Unsuitable Attachment but Cape won’t like either of those, so we are casting about wildly and the best we have found so far is Reserved for Crocodiles, which is eye-catching indeed – and after all any title can be written into the text! I still have to revise and improve a little – this time there are rather too many references to pink paraffin, as there were to Tio Pepe and gin in A Glass of Blessings. I am reading Morte D’Urban, an American RC novel, very funny.
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
8 February 1963
Dearest Bob,
Such an ironical thing happened – I had started a letter to you last weekend on my typewriter, telling you that on Friday last, 1st Feb., we had a burglary and leaving the letter in the typewriter to finish later. But on Monday, 4th Feb., the thief or thieves broke in again, this time taking the typewriter with the letter in it! So I suppose you will never get that letter. I can’t remember quite how much I told you, except that they hadn’t taken the MS of my novel, but only small items of jewellery and Hilary’s camera. But on Monday they took the typewriter, an electric fire and some silver. The police of course came very quickly and have the matter in hand though I don’t suppose they will ever catch him or them. I think it was having it twice that was so horrid – of course it was done during the day when we were both out and the neighbours heard nothing. Everyone is being very careful now, but it gives one an insecure feeling. Yet all our friends have had to undergo this, so why not us – I suppose all experience however unpleasant can be turned to good effect in fiction.
I have finished my novel and the best title seems to be An Unsuitable Attachment, though as ‘they’ are almost certain not to like that I have got several more titles in reserve. Hazel and Hilary have both read it and seemed to like it, but I am still making a few final improvements before sending it to the publisher. I feel the effort of it all is so great that I shall never write another, yet even now vague ideas begin to turn over in my mind.
We had terrible ‘voltage reductions’, no heat from electric fires and no TV picture till 10.30 p.m. Luckily we have coal and paraffin too, though, and we managed to avoid frozen pipes and bursts which is a great blessing. Even the ‘toilet’ at the vicarage of St Lawrence the Martyr, Chevening Road, was frozen up on one occasion.
Mrs P. C. [the vicar’s wife]. ‘How are you off for candles, dear!’
B.P. ‘Oh, all right, thank you, and we haven’t had any total blackouts yet.’
Mrs P. C. ‘Well, don’t forget there’s plenty of candles in the church dear – I should take some if I were you.’
Love.
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
24 February 1963
Dear Mr Larkin,
Many thanks for your letter – and how quickly the time goes. And yet in other ways this winter has seemed endless. Was there a time when we were not forever on our knees filling paraffin stoves? I hope you are well (perhaps centrally?) heated – poets should not have to worry about how to keep pipes from freezing and all that dreariness – but I suppose it should be part of every novelist’s experience. (Though I suppose one could make too much of it!)
I sent my novel to Cape last week but don’t know yet what they think of it. I feel it can hardly come up to Catch 22 or The Passion Flower Hotel for selling qualities but I hope they will realise that it is necessary for a good publisher’s list to have something milder. It is called (at present) An Unsuitable Attachment, which I don’t think they’ll like, so I have various other alternatives. I don’t think they can make one have ‘Love’ in the title again. Did I tell you that there was a Librarian in it? Of course only in a small way – the Library is rather like ours at the International African Institute – not to be compared with University Libraries and their problems, need I say.… I will certainly let you have a proof copy when it gets to that stage but please don’t think that I expect you to do anything unless you feel like it, but anything in the way of a review would of course be very welcome, as I don’t suppose I shall get all that many! In many ways one gets to disregard reviews or lack of them as one goes on – seeing so many brilliant new works of fiction appearing, almost every week, and new young reviewers. But I am promised The Naked Lunch to read some time, so I shall see if I agree with Mary McCarthy or Philip Toynbee.
I was interested to read about you in John Wain’s autobiography and also (somewhere else) that you wrote about two poems a year. But I do wish, as I’ve said before, that you would bring out another collection of your poems – surely the time is ripe?
Yours sincerely,
Barbara Pym