The effect of the so-called Swinging Sixties made Barbara’s novels seem unacceptable, especially to a publishing house like Cape which was beginning to specialise in what were then called ‘contemporary’ novels and whose list, as Barbara wryly remarked, consisted mainly of ‘men and Americans’. In 1963 they rejected her novel An Unsuitable Attachment. ‘Of course,’ she wrote to Philip Larkin, ‘it may be that this book is much worse than my others, though they didn’t say so.’ She would have been, as she always had been, willing to make any revisions her publisher thought necessary, but no one made any such suggestions.
The unexpectedness and finality of this blow (since in that particular literary climate no other publisher would take it) severely damaged her self-confidence. She felt that it was her failure as a writer that was the reason for the rejection rather than that the times were unpropitious for her kind of novel, and for a while she mistrusted her own talents as well as her critical judgement.
She started several novels, one with an academic setting which she though might be more ‘publishable’ – but she was never satisfied with them and they were never completed or revised. At no time, in spite of suggestions made to her by well-meaning friends, would she ever compromise and write in a style or form that was not her own.
In 1968 she completed The Sweet Dove Died, inspired, in part, by her fondness for her friend Richard Roberts, a young Bahamian who ran an antique shop. She sent the novel to various publishers (even, at one stage, under the name of Tom Crampton) but, in spite of its ‘stronger’theme, it was no more acceptable than An Unsuitable Attachment. ‘ Not the kind of novel’, one publisher wrote, ‘to which people are turning.’
There were some bright spots. In October 1971 her friend Bob Smith published an article entitled ‘How Pleasant to Know Miss Pym’ in the journal Ariel, the first critical appreciation of her work. In 1965 the BBC had serialised No Fond Return of Love on Woman’s Hour and her novels remained on the shelves of public libraries in the Portway Reprint Series. The demand from her public was still there.
In May 1971 she had an operation for breast cancer and made a good recovery. In 1974 she suffered a kind of stroke which had a curious effect, as of dyslexia, an inability to assemble the letters of some words correctly, a totally incapacitating disability for an indexer and proof-reader. She recovered from this quite quickly but was advised to retire from the Institute.
Hilary retired from the BBC in 1971 and in 1972 she had bought a cottage at Finstock, about 14 miles west of Oxford. Barbara had been living there at weekends and in a bed-sitting room in Balcombe Street during the week while she worked at the Institute. Now she settled with Hilary at Finstock, immersing herself in country life – jam-making, village activities (Finstock was a friendly, sociable place), the Local History Society. She now completed the novel that had been simmering in her mind for some time about four elderly people in an office and the effect of retirement upon two of them. She wrote it for her own enjoyment and for that of her friends, having, by then, little expectation of its being published.
In April 1975 she finally met Philip Larkin. They had been corresponding since 1961 when he had planned to write a review article of her next novel. Their meeting turned out to be like an incident in a Barbara Pym novel. Two shy and reserved people (‘ I shall probably be wearing a beige tweed suit or a Welsh tweed cape if colder. I shall be looking rather anxious, I expect’), they met at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Hardly had they sat down at a table in the bar when they were joined by a bluff, red-faced man, of the kind who attaches himself to strangers in hotels, who engaged them in jovial conversation for what seemed like hours.
H.H.