24 March 1963. To receive a bitter blow on an early Spring evening (such as that Cape don’t want to publish An Unsuitable Attachment – but it might be that someone doesn’t love you any more) – is it worse than on an Autumn or Winter evening? Smell of bonfire (the burning of rose prunings etc), a last hyacinth in the house, forsythia about to burst, a black and white cat on the sofa, a small fire burning in the grate, books and Sunday papers and the remains of tea.
1963 so far. A year of violence, death and blows.
The bad Winter up to the end of February without a break.
Death of Hugh Gaitskell.
Two burglaries.
My typewriter stolen.
My novel rejected by Cape.
Dr Beeching’s plan for sweeping away of railways and stations.
Reading The Naked Lunch.
The Bishop of Woolwich’s book Honest to God.
My novel rejected by Heath.
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (60,000? copies sold on 1st day of publication [4th April]).
Daniel George’s stroke.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
12 May 1963
Dear Mr Larkin,
Many thanks for your letter of several weeks ago. I liked to think of you at those Library Conferences – it is comforting to know that such things go on in this violent world. As for the teapots and hot water jugs left standing on the polished table (and it being marked in consequence), I found myself thinking ‘What a fussy man’ – but then it occurred to me that perhaps the Warden was a woman?
Your kind intention to write something about my novels may not after all be fulfilled because Cape have decided that they don’t want to publish An Unsuitable Attachment after all! I write this calmly enough, but really I was and am upset about it and think they have treated me very badly, considering that I have been with them for thirteen years and published six novels, some of which have been fairly successful, even if the sales of the last two were rather modest. I was not altogether surprised because several other Cape authors have been similarly treated – I don’t know whether you have heard any murmur of the distant rumblings in 30 Bedford Square as the new regime gets to work with axe and bulldozer, but the Cape list is now certainly different from what it was and naturally one hopes that Jonathan is turning in his grave.
Of course it may be that this novel is much worse than my others, though they didn’t say so, giving their reason for rejecting it as their fear that with the present cost of book production etc. etc. they doubted whether they could sell enough copies to make a profit.
But I mustn’t bore you with all this and apologise for having written this much in the role of indignant rejected middle-aged female author (a pretty formidable combination, don’t you think?). Of course I am hoping that somebody else will have the goodness to take it. Robert Liddell, whom I have known for many years (he was one of the characters in Some Tame Gazelle) has suggested people I could approach in Longmans, Gollancz and Hutchinson, and I have also been urged to try Fabers, so we shall see. But it may be that none of them will want it – do you think the title unsaleable? I fear the attachment is not so unsuitable as the public (reading) might wish and perhaps it is altogether too mild a book for present tastes. But then that has always been a sort of fault of mine. It might be printed privately by that man in Ilfracombe who advertises in the Church Times – with a subsidy from the Ford Foundation perhaps. Or it could be cyclostyled and distributed privately to a few select persons. You as a Librarian will, I am sure, appreciate the niceties of all this. How to enter it in a bibliography and all that.
Having taken up so much with all this I must now say what I ought to have said first – how very glad I am to know that Fabers are going to bring out another collection of your poems. And about time too! This writing of about two poems a year is all very well, but … I presume it will include all my favourite ones (esp. ‘Faith Healing’) and that you won’t leave any out? As for Jill, I shall be interested to read that because I have only read A Girl in Winter and that a long time ago. In what way are you revising it? – I suppose only in details, because isn’t a novel like a poem or a piece blown by a glassblower – once it is formed there is really nothing much you can do about it except tinker with details. Perhaps I should revise your novel and you mine. That might have interesting results.
Yes, I have a shrinking from publicity too, which is just as well as I seem to be doomed to failure and to sink down into obscurity, at present anyway. Yet I like to think that a few people will read what I have written.
I must again apologise for this boring and egotistical letter but you will, I’m sure, understand and make allowances. It ought to be enough for anybody to be the Assistant Editor of Africa, especially when the Editor is away lecturing for six months at Harvard, but I find it isn’t quite.
With all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Barbara Pym
40 Brooksville Avenue
8 July 1963
Dear Mr Larkin,
Many thanks for your kind letter of astonishment and indignation. It was comforting to think of you leaving for a ‘short tour of Midland Universities’ and I hope it was comforting to you and ‘successsful’, if that is a suitable word.
Since I last wrote I have sent my book to Longmans, where I had an introduction, but they have decided not to publish it, and say what one had suspected, that ‘novels like An Unsuitable Attachment, despite their qualities, are getting increasingly difficult to sell’, though they did say it was ‘most excellently written’. And of course the more one looks at the books now being published, not to mention the stirring events of this year [the Profumo scandal], the less likely it seems that anyone, except a very select few, would want to read a novel by me. I could almost offer my services to Dr Stephen Ward as a ghost writer, for he is a Canon’s son and surely I could write about his early years if not the later ones.
Anyway I shall try a few more publishers before laying the book aside for ever. I thought I would try Macmillan and then perhaps Faber, though I would feel shy about accepting your kind offer to say a word to Charles Monteith. Because you haven’t read the book and it may be hopeless for all you know! It is rather a mild book. I shall try to make my next (which I have almost started) less so!
Excuse this scrappy letter, finished off at the end of a working day, surrounded by material for the October Africa – need I explain or apologise further?
All good wishes –
Barbara Pym
5 June. Oh those meals with her – indigestible Italian food in Soho restaurants of which one wouldn’t dare to see the kitchen. At least now they would not have to go to bed – no love only friendship or whatever this light irritability and boredom was called.
6 June. The middle-aged woman with an Italian lover (both academics) who comes over occasionally. His hatred of Naples and Neapolitans. Love of Guinness. He eats too quickly whereas she likes to linger over her food. He is preoccupied with death. After a strict Catholic upbringing the pagan layer has seeped through or oozed up to the top.
The (Presbyterian) Minister who complains that he has to work on Sundays and therefore ought to have another day off to make up for it. Yet outside his chapel we see the notice ‘This is the day that the Lord has given – let us rejoice in it’.
14 August. A wet day. Hampstead, Keats’ House. A pity it looks out on to some ugly modern houses. Inside it is rather austere and simple. The engagement ring he gave to Fanny Braun is a red stone (almandine: ‘a garnet of violet tint’ Concise Oxford Dictionary) set in gold. The curator has filled the conservatory with begonias, pelargoniums, geraniums, ‘We try to keep it a thing of beauty,’ he says. There are bunches of grapes hanging from the vine. How full of vines altogether Hampstead seems to be.
15 August. This afternoon to see the Henry Moore–Francis Bacon exhibition. It is a rather hot afternoon and the gallery (New London, Bond St) is underground so that the effect is claustrophobic which seems appropriate. The gallery is small and has all-over black carpet. The Bacon pictures look softer when you see them in the flesh than they do in hard glossy reproductions and the colours are beautiful. Some are of his friend. (‘Not very nice to show your friend looking like that’). Most of the people looking at the pictures seem to be solitary. And this was better because comments always sound so silly. Later, walking in Bond Street, I see a young man sitting alone in a grand antique shop, presumably waiting for customers. A woman admirer might be a great nuisance always coming to see him.
Deborah has been ‘taken up’ by Monica an older woman who works as an ‘Editor’ in one of our great University Presses. She is a devout Anglo-Catholic and wants to have the cottage blessed. The vicar comes and there is a rather awkward ceremony with the cat putting her head in the Holy Water. Monica should go on rather about some man where she works – now getting past the age for loving detachment – gradually hardens into hostility so that she now dislikes and avoids men, is annoyed if one comes and sits by her in a bus.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
23 August 1963
Dear Mr Larkin,
Many thanks for your letter from Sark (who can be writing to me from there? I wondered suspiciously, not recognising your hand immediately). It was perhaps rash to buy a Panama hat though it will last you for the next thirty years or so – 32/6 seems expensive but not when you think of it as an investment.
I hope you did one or two poems – don’t you carry your MS book about with you everywhere or write them on the backs of envelopes? I’ve often wondered what poets did, thinking that perhaps they had no need of the more material aids to writing. On a wet afternoon recently I went to Keats’ house in Hampstead (never having been before) and saw that he had written two poems at least – inside his Ben Jonson and another book – Shakespeare, I think.
I like the idea of the Introduction for The Whitsun Weddings being anti-twenties – I suppose when you were at Oxford nobody came into The George wearing a silver lamé shirt or went around with a lizard on their shoulder or carried a toy kangaroo – and that was the early thirties when I was up. But surely there must have been girls, even in the austere one-bottle-of-wine a term forties – (shoulder-length pageboy hair, square shoulders and short skirts?). It must have been strange. The Meagre Time – don’t you think quite a good title for a novel?
Since I last wrote I’ve sent my book to Macmillan, but they have returned it regretting it wasn’t suitable for their list. So I have decided for the moment to lay it aside and start something else when I can. I don’t feel that I can ‘improve’ An Unsuitable Attachment at present; though obviously it could be improved. I haven’t the energy to do it and it might still be unacceptable whatever I did to it. Three people who have read it tell me it isn’t below the standard of my others. (I’m incapable of judging now!) I did read it over very critically and it seemed to me that it might appear naive and unsophisticated, though it isn’t really, to an unsympathetic publisher’s reader, hoping for that novel about negro homosexuals, young men in advertising, etc.
If you would like to read it I should be very glad to send you one of my two copies, which are both idle at the moment. But I feel it would probably not be worth approaching Faber with it.
I see I haven’t congratulated you on being elected to your College SCR (St John’s?) – which I do most heartily – Was it Larkin, the Librarian (some problems of) or Larkin the poet – I suppose the latter.
All best wishes, etc,
Barbara Pym
40 Brooksville Avenue
9 October
Dear Mr Larkin,
Many thanks for your letter. After I had suggested you might like to read An Unsuitable Attachment, I began to feel it was rather an imposition, but having said it I felt it would be stupid to change my mind, so I have today posted my carbon copy of the MS to you. (To The Librarian’ marked Personal). Once anything gets into our Library it seems to be swallowed up, so this MS may find itself classified as a thesis or something (not that I mean to cast doubts on the efficiency of your staff!). Anyway I hope it won’t prove too awkward to handle.
You will see exactly why a new publisher wouldn’t take it on, I think; the beginning is too vague, too many characters, and there’s not enough plot. And who is the heroine? I think perhaps I could rewrite it some time, but not now, as I have started something else.
I hope you will have had a nice ‘tour’ and return strengthened and refreshed to the north, and ‘some problems of’. We have plenty with the next number of Africa – trying to avoid having two rather dull articles together, and nothing to put in ‘Notes and News’ but endless Conferences and new African Studies Centres springing up in the most unlikely places.
All good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Barbara Pym
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
40 Brooksville Avenue
16 October 1963
Dearest Bob,
Who is your wicked friend from Lagos? Do I know him? A taxi from Abeokuta must have been rather expensive. Do you know that Michael Crowder is apparently going to arrange for a performance of The Palm Wine Drinkard in Yoruba for the delectation of our Executive Council? At Daryll Forde’s suggestion, admittedly! That would be one entertainment Miss Pym would not wish to attend. We have so many Nigerians at St Lawrence’s now. There is a fashion for them getting baptised, too, started by a pretty girl called Florence (an Itsekiri) to whom I am godmother. Now a young man has fastened on to Hilary and asked her to ‘see him through’. Personally, I have the unworthy feeling that it is rather because he is attracted to Hilary than because he wants baptism, but I may be maligning him! Anyway, have the CMS (it would be them?) failed in the Niger Delta, for I should have thought that most of them would have been baptised already. We did meet one, at Florence’s baptism party, who was a lapsed Catholic and announced his intention of coming to our church, but he hasn’t shown up yet! At the party we drank Coca Cola, British wine and tea and ate biscuits, cake and delicious Nigerian rice and fish with hot peppery sauce.
Richard came one Saturday with the Mrs Beeton and stayed for a drink and an informal lunch. Then he drove us to Cricklewood where he was taking some pictures to be cleaned to an old retired Polish General.
Love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
3 November 1963
Dear Mr Larkin,
I was so much encouraged and cheered by your letter about An Unsuitable Attachment. In a way I hadn’t wanted you to read it, not only because it seemed a terrible burden for you to wade through a second-carbon typescript, but also I feared that you might find it so very much below the standard (if I can say that) of my others that I should feel I could never write another word! Anyway I am so glad it did give you some amusement and I am grateful for your comments and criticisms, which will be a help to me when I come to rewrite it, if I do, and also in a general way for the future. I can’t help feeling that it would be better to start at Faber’s with a new book, though, or with this one improved in some ways. I could certainly send them a better typescript, too! You are quite right about Ianthe and John. Ianthe is very stiff and John had been intended to be much worse – almost the kind of man who would bigamously marry a spinster, older than himself, for the sake of £50 in the P.O. Savings Bank! And some of the other people are too much like those in earlier books. I’m glad you liked Faustina.
I have no contractual obligations with Cape now – they had the first refusal of this one. I suppose it was money, really, they didn’t think they could sell enough copies. However well they do out of Ian Fleming and Len Deighton and all the Americans they publish, I suppose they can’t afford any book that will not cover its cost. (I don’t think I really feel this!)
How well you type – not that I ought to find that surprising. And not a word about your own books – have you written the Introduction yet or are you perhaps even now in the middle of it?
Life in Hull sounds much more carefree than London – is it like Eating People is Wrong? A sherry party at noon – how civilised that sounds, though there is the question of lunch afterwards. As for a party with twisting, I have really passed that now, though the other day I did go to a sort of Nigerian tea party where we did the Highlife. I was pleased to see that I had guessed the drinks that Granville Jameson [a West Indian in the original version of An Unsuitable Attachment] would offer correctly – there was Coke, port, Guinness and tea.
January Africa will be rather dull, I fear, but some more promising articles have appeared for April. I have hurt and offended somebody by leaving out an account of their Conference (9 a.m. Lecture in Amhani. 10.15 Tea and biscuits etc) but have written a propitiatory letter and promised to put it in the next number.
Best wishes and thanks,
B.P.
May I say ‘Philip’, if that is what people call you, or should we go through the academic convention of ‘Philip Larkin’ and ‘Barbara Pym’?
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
40 Brooksville Avenue
8 December 1963
Dearest Bob,
I have received the offprint, for which many thanks – the first time anyone has ever given me an inscribed one. How many free ones does J. Hist. Soc. Nigeria give its contributors? We give 25, but of course people, especially Americans, order lots more.
Richard has been reading some of my books – I gave him Excellent Women and A Glass of Blessings – do you think that a good choice? E. W. he found terribly sad, but witty – why is it that men find my books so sad? Women don’t particularly. Perhaps they (men) have a slight guilt feeling that this is what they do to us, and yet really it isn’t as bad as all that. I haven’t got on very far with the new book I started, though some of it forms in my mind, but the last few weeks I have been terribly busy and tired. Daryll’s book on the Yakö is in second proof stage and of course I have to give it much attention, being so fulsomely thanked in the foreword.
Love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
12 January 1964
Dear Philip,
I will start by making the usual apology for a typewritten letter, but I am just about to ‘do some writing’ and so to type something might put me in the mood. I have written seven or eight chapters of a new novel. Of course in the end it will turn out not to be any good, perhaps, but I may as well write something even if only for private circulation among a few friends. I am glad you lent it (my last MS) to a friend to read and hope she enjoyed at least some of it. Catherine used to be quite a favourite heroine of mine but she now seems less real to me than Wilmet and Prudence (my own favourites). Of course I am longing to read Jill (which I seem to have missed when it came out first) – I can’t believe it can be badly written – I thought, somehow, it was for the poems you had written the Introduction, or perhaps you have written two, which would be better still! I read the new Kingsley Amis on Boxing Day, sitting up in bed, eating cold duck – most enjoyable, of course not one of his best but I would rather have a lesser work by a writer I like than any number of masterpieces by.… I also thought the hero not so bad as the reviews had led one to believe – but it was rather difficult to imagine that somebody like Helène would really have gone to bed with someone made to sound so very unattractive? I can believe it was not much exaggerated, though, the American scene.
I hope the horn-players are less noisy. Are they a Thurberish couple or a jazz group or just people learning to play – you didn’t make it clear. I suppose 32 Pearson Park is a large Georgian or Victorian house converted into flats – horn players on the ground floor, Larkin on the first, and who up above? Or have you got the two top floors, what they call a maisonette? I do know that your part is newly decorated and that you have a cleaned tufty carpet (perhaps Indian?) in your sitting room.
I hope your driving lessons go well – it must be quite terrifying learning now, though people gain more confidence behind the wheel of a car, I believe. I did learn years ago in Shropshire but I have not kept up my licence as I have never had a car or much opportunity of driving one. I certainly couldn’t go to work in one as there is nowhere to park it in Fetter Lane. Which leads me on to speak of our Library (? capital L) and what the staff do. There seem to be more staff in the Library than anywhere else – I suppose their purpose is to discourage Visitors. Still, I expect the staff at the University Library, Hull, do just the same? We don’t buy a great many books, but have good holdings of foreign periodicals, some being exchanged with Africa. (I have sometimes thought of writing a Pinterish play about our Library.)
I hope you survived Christmas – we had four people staying for part of the time, and it is a rather exhausting ordeal for the churchgoer, particularly as we had two ranting sermons, not quite the few words of greeting and comfort one expects at that time. And Lent begins early this year.… I sometimes think I shall give up going to church for Lent, but have never yet had the courage.
All good wishes,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
16 February 1964
Dear Philip,
It was a lovely surprise and pleasure to receive (on Ash Wednesday) a copy of The Whitsun Weddings – thank you so much. As I immediately began reading it, with the breakfast still to be cleared away, I wondered if I’d ever told you how much I liked your poems. If I never did I hope it wasn’t really necessary – it was just one of those things that went without saying (which is perhaps why it ought to have been said, as Miss Compton-Burnett might remark). Anyway.… Quite a lot of new ones and a favourite I’d seen in your Anthology (‘Faith Healing’), not to mention ones cut out of The Listener, now all together in ‘handy form’ for reading in Lyons or in bed.
Did you see in one of the Sunday papers that my late publisher is to publish a book by one of the Beatles (John Lennon? I think?). That and Miss Bowen should give their list the variety it has seemed to need lately.
All good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
The previous vicar’s wife couldn’t have presided at Bingo – but this vicar’s mother does, rather grimly as if a duty.
When she is grooming her cat she has to put on her spectacles to see the fleas, gleaming red-brown among the combings. ‘I must say, she keeps Pussy spotless.’
25 March. I take my lunch to the darkest corner of the Kardomah, to the table near the door of the Gents Cloakroom where the silly office lovers used to sit. Where are they now? …
Sunday at Joan’s – a bit much to have to listen to Maurice Quick praising Joan and saying what ‘a lovely sense of humour’ she has when I sit there dumb and uninteresting. How often do women have to listen to praise of other women and (if they are nice) just sit there agreeing. And yet men don’t do it maliciously, just in their simplicity.
29 March. Easter Sunday. Coldest since 1903. But the church is warm and full of people. In the evening go to supper with Richard. We eat cosily in almost total darkness (one candle). On the mantelpiece many Easter cards and a telegram. One couldn’t really give him anything that he hadn’t already got. Not even devotion and/ or love. It gives one a hopeless sort of feeling. Roman Emperors (a Coles wallpaper) on the wall facing the bed which is large and covered in orange candlewick.
The Unsuitability of Easter Cards – a gold cross wreathed in Spring flowers (violets).
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
7 April 1964
Dear Philip,
I was amazed at Jill. Such maturity – and detachment and ‘Sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo …’ it was difficult to believe it had been written by a boy of 21! Of course it is very well written and observed too – I don’t mean to sound surprised at that, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so good. And remembering A Girl in Winter one wonders why you didn’t go on writing fiction, and regrets it. I suppose you were too good and didn’t perhaps sell enough, and then you preferred writing poetry? But couldn’t you possibly give us a novel now and again – those nine years in a northern university … surely, you are being rather selfish? And the Introduction is splendid, though one could have wished for more.
Anyway, that’s what I feel about it and no doubt lots of other people will too. I should be tempted, not to write a thesis on the possible origins of the working-class hero in post-war Engl. fiction, but to produce a scholarly note on the occurrence of the name ‘Bleaney’ (see Jill p. 73).
I wonder if you have bought a car yet? No doubt you will have decided by now which kind best expresses your personality or gives the impression you would like to create. I think I see you in a medium-sized car, nothing too flashy, but I may be wrong.
I never thanked you for returning the typescript of An Unsuitable Attachment, which I have put aside for the moment but shall perhaps revise one day. I think it an excellent idea that somebody should ‘go over’ in Rome. I am struggling with my new unfinished one, which is set in the country mostly and has about ten chapters roughly written. Over the coldest Easter for 80 years I tried to beat the first two chapters into a better shape now that the characters are becoming clearer, but why is the material in a novel so recalcitrant? It ought to be easy when you think that you can do exactly as you like with these people and have absolute power to change them in any way you will. I like writing, but am rather depressed at future prospects for my sort of book. Once you said, I think, that not everybody wants to read about Negro homosexuals. It seems appropriate that I am now reading James Baldwin’s Another Country lent to me by a young friend. A ‘powerful’ very well-written book, but so upsetting – one is really glad never to have had the chance of that kind of life!
This letter doesn’t really convey the great pleasure I’ve had from Jill and The W. W., but I hope you’ll take the will for the deed. (Is that right? One is sometimes wrong about these proverbs and saws?) I was amused to see in Peterborough ‘Jazz Reviewer’s Poems’. Of course I think of ‘Poet’s Jazz Reviews’ or even ‘Librarian’s Poems’.
With all good wishes,
Yours
Barbara
May Day. At Covent Garden with Skipper. He crunches ice as we drink orangeade in the Crush Bar – the great oil paintings, the flowers (real). A happy evening. If ‘they’ went to Covent Garden Leonora would like to feel the touch of his sleeve against her bare arm (but that would be as far as it would go). Close, intimate red and gold semi-darkness. Here he is mine she thinks, the young admirer she has created for herself. Quinton [later ‘James’] plays his part with rather self-conscious enjoyment.
12 May. Athens. Jock’s party. British Council Representative in Viet Nam, Mary Renault arriving all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple black. Elizabeth Taylor – the smile on her face as she looks at me when the band at the taverna (Johnny’s Place) is playing ‘Colonel Bogey’. The taverna is very much like Cecchio’s in Rome, even to the display of food as one enters and the lurking cats. In the beautiful Zappeion gardens, the delicious fragrance of shrubs, the oranges hanging from trees. Here a middle-aged English or American lady might be picked up by a young Greek adventurer.
Drinks with Charles Shoup (a deraciné, rich American painter) in his wonderful flat with views of everything and a lovely terrace. Many bits of marble and odds and ends he has picked up – sculptures, a miniature wooden confessional, a red fox rug on the sofa. Elizabeth is there looking sad as it’s her last evening.
20 May. At Delphi, which is wonderful. We pass through Erythrai, where there is a good baker. Thebes (the dump of old cars). Miss the crossroads where Oedipus killed his father (asleep) but saw it on the way back. Helicon and Parnassus. At Levadia the bus stops long enough to visit the ‘Toilettes’ and have a drink and eat little bits of lamb on wooden skewers.
2 June. My birthday and dinner with Richard at his flat. Champagne and a lovely present. A Victorian china cup and saucer. ‘The Playfellow’ – a lady and her cat.
To Richard Roberts (Skipper)
40 Brooksville Avenue
30 June 1964 (6.45 a.m!)
Darling Richard,
Here it has been summery and yesterday I saw Bob. We had a large lunch and then I had taken the afternoon off so we went to Bourdon House [a rather superior antique shop]. It was a rich experience, my first visit and should be used in some fictional setting. Of course there were several things I should have liked – a nice pair of mirrors 295 guineas, I think. Even the smallest malachite egg was 7 gns.
Then Bob came back to have tea here. His unexpectedly early arrival and my going away for the weekend meant that the house was dusty and full of dead flowers – perhaps a not inappropriate setting for a not-very-with-it novelist, but he didn’t seem to notice. How full of fictional situations life is! I am now making fuller use of all this and have gone back to writing a novel I started some months ago. I am alone so much at the moment that it seems a good opportunity.
Much love
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
18 August 1964 (Night)
My dearest Skipper,
Thank you for sending back the letter. It was perhaps silly and capricious of me to ask for it, but I was punished by the disappointment of finding that an envelope addressed in your hand contained only my own letter back again. So that will teach me (‘Behaviour’, indeed!).
Anyway this little note will contain all the fondness of the other letter, in a concentrated form like a cube of chicken stock or Oxo. It had been meant to stretch from Wednesday evening last week and to greet you when you got back from where you didn’t go! Here it rained incessantly and the office is in chaos anyway with redecoration, tidying and throwing away old files and other melancholy tasks. At lunchtime I went out briefly – it was the kind of day to be horrid to somebody, like that other day, but luckily the opportunity didn’t arise. This evening we went to see some friends and they were disposing of some books, so I got a Christina Rossetti (just right for pressing a little cyclamen in) and E.B. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, with an inscription dated 1901. Rather the sort of poets Ianthe might have read?
I have thought of a few more good scenes that I might write in, one inspired by the idea of you and Bob having lunch together, though it won’t really be a bit like!
I hope you are reasonably well and happy – I really mean very well and reasonably happy – no more of those sad looks that cut me to the heart, Skipper dear. I would send you Peruvian heliotrope if I knew where to get it. But love anyway,
Barbara
At Buckland. Trials of a novelist. Miss Conway or Mrs Godwin has read one of my novels, but which? We go through all the titles but none seems to ring a bell – so embarrassing (‘You read it – I was too busy!’).
4 September. (Oh what a month August was too!) Walking in Hampstead with Skipper. Parked the car in Church Row and went up by the Huguenot Cemetery – all beautiful in the dark, warm evening. Into the little R. C. church on Holly Mount, R. lights a candle but I don’t somehow like to and don’t say anything either. It is a bit too much like something in a B.P. novel. Later we walk to Windmill Hill, Admiral’s House, see Galsworthy’s house etc, have coffee in the High St. Talk and wander about peering into people’s uncurtained windows and even their letter boxes. And on Thursday he is going to Venice.
9 September. The language of flowers … in Gamage’s an artificial pond with plastic waterlilies. What do they say – the same as Mizpah?
10 September. She (Leonora) thinks perhaps this is the kind of love I’ve always wanted because absolutely nothing can be done about it!
Telephoning me this afternoon Richard asks that I should leave him all my notebooks! No. XX [she numbered all her notebooks] he should certainly have. Perhaps this one (XXI) too.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
14 September 1964
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for your letter, and card from Northern Ireland. It seemed a very original place for a holiday, but I daresay even that isn’t as remote as it seems and I could hear the strains of that transistor from that person sitting on the rock. I wish I could have another holiday, but I used it all up going to Greece, which seems such a long time ago now. I sometimes wish I were a University person, even with a ‘crushing teaching load’ – but I suppose the Library is open all the time, isn’t it, even if the Librarian is not there? You will need to gather your strength for the beginning of your Library extension. It does seem to cost rather a lot, but then estimates for building do seem rather remote and difficult to grasp. I suppose it is a good thing that you have joined SCOLMA, which always sounds like a kind of breakfast food or perhaps a tonic for tired academics? Our library has been made slightly more interesting – in a macabre way – by a rather peculiar young man joining the staff. He doesn’t come in till 10.35 most mornings and is given to cryptic utterances which one can only half hear. I don’t have much to do with him myself but hear all this from the other staff. I find it is pleasanter to observe these things rather than actually participate in them.
I have now got all your books and wish there were more. It seems wicked when there are so few novelists one can bear to read.
I am gratified that you have been re-reading mine and have even spoken of me with John Betjeman, who certainly reviewed me very kindly. I have got some way with another one, but at the moment I have turned back to An Unsuitable Attachment and am trying to do something to that in the hope that it might be publishable. A friend who had come fresh (as it were!) to my work read it and made some more suggestions, and as it is now getting on for two years since I finished it I can look on it with more detachment. But every now and then I feel gloomy about it all and wonder if anybody will ever want to publish anything of mine again. When I have finished my revision perhaps I might avail myself of your kind offer to introduce me to Fabers – if it is still open!
Yours etc
Barbara
From the novelist’s notebook – Sunday 4 October 1964 – sent to Richard Roberts as a letter
‘Are you going to fry them?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Yes – why not?’ Immediately she was on the defensive and saw the kitchen as it must appear to his half-American eyes – the washing-up from lunchtime, the litter of things not thrown away, and the paw-marks on the table.
In silence they watched the sausages lying in the frying-pan. After a while the fat began to splutter.
‘They’re bursting,’ she said unhappily.
‘I always prick them with a fork,’ he said in a kind tone.
‘Well, yes, I did prick them.’
‘With your fingernail?’ He smiled.
‘No, with a knife, I think…’
… Afterwards, when he had gone, it was that part of the evening she remembered – her appalling domestic inefficiency and the meagre meal she had given him when he must have been rather hungry. What was it about him that brought out this curious inadequacy in her? Then another occasion came into her mind. Something to do with a tin of ‘luncheon meat’ (who, she wondered were the people who ate it for ‘luncheon’?). It was only much later, in the watches of the night, one could have said – that the other occasion came back to her, the one for which she really needed to be forgiven. Would he, she wondered, put it down to her anthropologist’s ‘enquiring mind’? That seemed too generous to be expected even of him. Perhaps it had been a desperate attempt to break down the awkwardness and loss of rapport she had felt between them, rather than a feminine desire for a scene with carefully thought-out bitter dialogue. (Enjoyable to write, though, she couldn’t help feeling with the detached part of the mind that watches us behaving in situations…). And in a way perhaps it had succeeded – she certainly felt better in the morning. She hoped he did too.
In church she prayed for them both and resolved to ask him for a proper meal (with cheese) very soon. It gave her a curious kind of pleasure to think of him preparing his luncheon, arranging his table in the elegant way he always did, in the cool clean Sunday morning ambience of Sussex Gardens, in that bright, sparkling air, free from the cats’ hairs which caused him such distress in Queen’s Park. Any cats’ hairs there, would be Siamese, as he had pointed out…
So you see, my dear, how with a little polishing life could become literature, or at least fiction! I hope you get its poor little message, or that it at least entertains you for a moment.
My love,
Barbara
11 October. Yesterday afternoon R. called just as I had finished putting my hair in rollers. He had been burgled – now the lovely square gold watch and the platinum and diamond one (in the style of the 20’s) left him by his father had gone. He needed company – so we had tea and he took us to a political meeting in Hammersmith to hear Sir Alec [Douglas-Home]. Then we went to Sussex Gardens for a drink. R. was in his scarlet pullover and rather long navy raincoat. Very sweet, but not, perhaps, Skipper ever again.
7 November. Lunch with R. at 231. Sherry, bean and bacon soup, crab and salad and chocolate cake. And Orvieto which (he said) he had remembered as being my favourite. Indeed! (But milk poured from the bottle).
Prof. Beecher is a Reader for one of the University Presses. By his bed is a small manual, almost like a devotional book: Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press [Oxford] first ed. April 1893.
18 November. Description by R. of the peacocks (on his mother’s estate in the Bahamas) being shut up at night ‘in a small greenhouse’ to protect them from the dogs (or was it one special peacock?). Afterwards he and I went up to the General’s and had coffee and collected two pictures. Everyone said how well I looked – ‘blooming’ – but is that joy at seeing R. again or what over three weeks away from him has done –
27 November. Lunched at the Golden Egg. Oh, the horror – the cold stuffiness, claustrophobic placing of tables, garish lights and mass produced food in steel dishes. And the egg-shaped menu! But perhaps one could get something out of it. The setting for a breaking-off, or some terrible news or an unwanted declaration of love.
28 November. Today as I sit in Lyons, a man comes to the table and a middle-aged woman is fetching food for him as I have fetched it for my darling R. on more than one occasion.
To Richard Roberts
40 Brooksville Avenue
My dearest Skipper (yes, that name does seem most suitable for you in the Bahamas)
I’m so glad your going home has been worthwhile for you, and you will be rewarded for going, as one so often is. Your 86 year old aunt sounds marvellous and how nice that you were able to take her on that trip. My father (also just 86) won’t even come to London!
I should think that it must be a relief to have somebody less complicated than ‘Gary Reindeer’ to be with, though of course we are drawn to the tortured and tortuous ones, you and I.
Do have some more photographs taken and let me choose the most characteristic even if not the most glamorous.
It says on this Airmail pad that 12 sheets and an envelope weighs less than half an ounce, but I doubt if I can go on at that length. Also, I am writing this in the office in the morning, which seems frightfully sinful.
I have practically finished the revision of that novel though I suppose I shall never be really satisfied with it. Now I must read it again with a cold critical eye. I really much more want to get on with the other one I started which will be more amusing. I hate writing ‘tender love scenes’ and am no good at it – why I wonder? Too inhibited and ‘behaviour’-ridden no doubt.
I hope you are well – blessings and prayers and everything
Barbara
31 January. Who but R. would be welcome in the middle of a Sunday afternoon (c. 3 p.m.). Are you still brown she asks idly. He pulled out his shirt and revealed a square of golden brown skin on his belly. She (Leonora) found herself thinking ‘All thy quaint Honour turn to dust/And into Ashes all my lust’. Except that he probably hasn’t any quaint honour. She reproaches him for not having been to Mass, ‘Then you didn’t pray for me’, since that is the only time he prays.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
16 February 1965
Dear Philip,
I have a great curiosity to know what you could have been doing at the Inst. of Social Anthropology in Oxford. Some conference, I suppose. It certainly wouldn’t matter if you put a hot jug down on a polished? table there, from my recollection of it. Yes, Professor Evans-Pritchard is perhaps the greatest of his generation and is of course known as ‘E-P’. He has little to do with our Institute these days and spends his time writing articles and books and studying Zande texts. They (the Azande) ‘relish putrescent meat’ or did in the good old days. E-P is an R.C. convert – rather unusual in an anthropologist – perhaps that explains the reproduction of old masters – if they were of a holy type?
I agree this is a depressing time of year, but November is really my least favourite month – or perhaps December, because that has Christmas too! Only yesterday though I noticed that it is getting brighter in the evenings and this morning there was almost a feeling of spring in the air. (Perhaps only women notice these things?)
Our Library problem, I mean the peculiar young man, seems to have been solved. At least, he was given the sack after Christmas, being told, I believe, that there was to be some ‘staff reorganisation’. Is that always how it’s done? Then a woman of uncertain age suddenly seemed to be sixty and she had to retire, and for a time it seemed as if nobody would come. But now there is a young girl … here I stopped writing yesterday, I suppose because I was seeing the procession of young girls over the years and perhaps got thinking that it’s only the older, duller and more reliable members of the staff who go on and on. Today, being surrounded by galley proofs, I feel a bit like your poem about the Toad ‘work’.
I have revised An Unsuitable Attachment – not very well, I believe and it will need some further polishing before it can be sent to any other publisher. I am also going on with another. I like the stage of having work to do on a book, before one actually has to take positive action, like writing to anyone. Revising and polishing could go on for ever.… I really still wonder if my books will ever be acceptable again when I read the reviews in the Sundays. I think it might be nice to be famous and sought after when one is rather old and ga-ga – not in one’s forties and fifties, or perhaps fame when you’re very young is good, if the years after aren’t too much of a let-down.
Yours ever,
Barbara
20 February. A sad day. Rang R. in the evening and he felt ‘guilty’ which I hate. He came to tea on Sunday in his very spoilt little Bahamian mood, full of euphoria, money and sex talk, teasing me and being unkind to Minerva. I get irritated with him.
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
40 Brooksville Avenue
1 March 1965
Dearest Bob,
I am still writing and there is plenty going on inside even though I’m not very optimistic and they may have to be privately printed by that man in Ilfracombe after all. I have revised An Unsuitable Attachment, though not very satisfactorily – but I think I can put it right with the help of Hazel’s criticisms, then I am in the middle of another book. I haven’t thought any more about working part time here, mainly because I doubt my capacity to earn money by writing, at the moment. If only I had a small private income or a husband – how badly I’ve arranged my life! I really think we do need novels like mine now – did you like Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness? I lent it to Richard, as he hadn’t read any of hers, but I don’t think it was really quite his kind of book. As you will no doubt have heard he came back from Nassau almost the day he was expected and looked very well and brown. His life there is full of such rich material for fiction, but I suppose it is really beyond my range. Richard’s mother is supposed to be going to Athens and the islands in April – with three American ladies, so that they can play bridge!
Love,
Barbara
24 May. Fortunately all the fury and bitterness I sometimes feel has stayed hidden inside me and R. doesn’t – perhaps never will – know! 25 May. All miserable again and determined to ‘end it all’ between us – but how? And why?
29 May. A letter from R. inviting us to dinner on my birthday. I phoned him and we talked. 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.
10 June. Leonora gets the young man to read the menu for her and the programme, rather than put on her glasses.
16 June. Lunch in the Kardomah with R. The salmon sandwiches and coffee and talking ‘business’ about bidding for a book for him – then a walk in the rain to Smiths to buy books for him to read on holiday. What a change to be happy for a moment – it may as well be recorded after all these weeks.
22 June. Wonderful peace with R. away (Istanbul now, then Greece and Venice!). They are altering the Kardomah and ‘improving’ the ground floor and soon it seems the basement will be gone. Where now will we be able to read and write and brood? First the mosaic peacocks went, now this! What emotions are trapped in that basement.
25 June. Went to Christie’s to view 3 books of natural history shell and bird prints that R. wants me to bid for. Very cosy in the basement looking at them – a chaos of books, a man correcting the proofs of a catalogue. A nice girl and an Italian gentleman come in to enquire about books he bought over a year ago and now apparently nowhere to be found.
1 July. Went to Christie’s to bid and got Sharpe’s 2 vols of Birds of Paradise for £1,000! It was rather nerve-wracking but rewarding and afterwards lunch at Fortnums.
19 July. R. to dinner – very successful. He brought me a little glass bird from Venice.
Rainer Maria Rilke 1873–1936
Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis 1855–1934
(18 years difference between them, but he was a man of genius)
To Bob Smith
40 Brooksville Avenue
22 July (4th after Trinity)
Dearest Bob,
Just after I had left you after that rather pleasant unexpected tea and Danish pastry in the Kardomah on Thursday afternoon, I ran into Professor Forde, just as I was rounding the corner into Fetter Lane. ‘Ah, there you are, Barbara,’ he said. ‘I went into your room but seeing you weren’t there – thought you must be in the Ladies.’ (So you see there is no need to tell people when you go out of the office.)
Love,
Barbara
17 August. My novel [An Unsuitable Attachment] is with Faber, but surely for not much longer. It may be better to find another interest – antiquarian books perhaps?
19 August. Last night it came back but with a nice letter from Charles Monteith. Now I feel as if I shall never write again, though perhaps I will eventually. Rather a relief to feel that I don’t have to flog myself to finish the present one since probably nothing I write could be acceptable now.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
21 August 1965
Dear Philip,
Just a line to say that Faber won’t take An Unsuitable Attachment – rather as I had feared, so I don’t feel too cast down. I can quite see that it wouldn’t be an economic proposition, and not the kind of book to impress a new publisher anyway. Charles Monteith wrote such a nice letter – thank you so much for introducing me to him and for all you have done on my behalf. I don’t know yet whether I shall try the book anywhere else – at the moment I don’t feel at all hopeful and have even thought how restful it would be never to write another word! But I expect I shall go on. The ideal is perhaps to be ‘at work’ on a book but never to finish it. After all, I suppose I am lucky to have got six books published.
How are you? Perhaps on holiday at this moment. (Surely nobody is in Hull in August?) I can’t feel you can have got much wear out of your panama hat this year. I am in the country this weekend, staying near Oxford, but haven’t had a holiday yet, only odd days – on one of which I went to Christie’s and bought on behalf of a friend two vols, of bird prints for £1,000! That was an experience, the bidding and the dealers, and might well come into a future unpublished novel.
I’ve been horribly busy at the office – everything late, proofs not coming, dreadful volumes of seminar papers to get ready for press. But my room is to be redecorated soon and I am to have a new carpet – speckled black and white that won’t show cigarette ash. Perhaps I shall then take on a new lease of life, editorially speaking.
It has just occurred to me – perhaps you are ‘Visiting Professor’ somewhere, though I hope not Los Angeles.
With all good wishes,
Barbara
24 August. Lunching at the FANY Club with R! He seems quite at home among them and his eyes shine when one pays him a compliment. Afterwards choose curtain material in Peter Jones. Then to sit in L’Atelier [his antique shop] for a moment or two while people pass and look at us in the window.
15 September. I find myself going to see Elgar’s grave (directed by an arrow) in the R.C. church at Little Malvern. The weather is dull but not unpleasant – rather calming and saddening and I’m glad I have brought Hardy’s poems with me. Tea in the Abbey tearooms – very good home-made cakes only 6d. each. In the Priory Gardens the smell of heliotrope reminds me of Skipper’s L’Heure Bleue (but one would have to change the sexes for a story wouldn’t one?).
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
30 September 1965
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for your sympathetic letter! I hope by now you will be back refreshed after Sark, ready to tackle any problems that SCOLMA may present during the coming autumn. I can imagine an Ibsen-ish situation developing now that your building plans are halted – all that latent power and energy – let it go into poetry!
This is only a note to ask if you would be so very kind as to let me know (on a postcard will do) the publishers Charles Monteith thought might be more sympathetic towards my novel. Not that I really think it’s much good, but the BBC are doing No Fond Return as the Woman’s Hour serial beginning 6 October and I thought it might be a propitious time to give the book one more try, perhaps. This was quite a surprise to me – and a pleasant one – I shall have to take the transistor to work!
I made some notes in Malvern and Worcester and Hereford on various points, and of course I am now beginning to feel that perhaps I can’t stop writing after all. Even if no one will publish me.
All good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
26 September. After the dentist went to the Wimpole Buttery. A delicious creamy cake tasting of walnuts. Now Skipperless one begins to understand ‘compensatory eating’. Better surely now to write the kind of novel that tells of one day in the life of such a woman.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
29 November 1965
Dearest Bob,
Not much news though what does one expect? I sent the script (as O. U.P. say) of my novel to Raleigh Trevelyan at Michael Joseph. ‘A pleasant book, but hardly strong enough’! almost exactly what Cape said of Some Tame Gazelle in 1936! Anyway for the moment I am not writing but resting and gathering material since every day gives one something. Miss Pym is still frequenting the sale rooms – a week or so ago R. pushed me into the end of a sale at Sotheby’s and made me bid for a book on the Bahamas for him, which I got. Really though I am more at home in Hodgson’s in Chancery Lane where Hazel and I spend happy lunch hours and prices are more realistic.
Love,
Barbara
To Bob Smith in Ibadan
40 Brooksville Avenue
25 March 1966
Dearest Bob,
Today the window of the Protestant Truth Society is in mourning – a picture of the Archbp. of Canterbury and the Pope against a black drapery and a placard saying ‘Archbishop betrays British Protestants’ or words to that effect. (I wonder, who arranged the window display and at what time of day or night?)
Did I not mention my own writing when I last wrote to you? The position at the moment is that I have sent the rejected novel (which I rewrote, as I may have told you) to a recommended agent (Hughes Massie) but have heard nothing for two months! (You may well say that is a very short time compared with what people sending articles to Africa have to wait!) But I hear vaguely from the person who recommended the agent that it is thought to be good but unpublishable at the present time. I haven’t heard officially yet, but it seems that is what it will be. Hazel suggests I should get my works printed by private subscription from those who would be willing to support me and I believe there are a few! Curiously enough I find I can still write and have started, or rather got quite well into, another book which looks as if it might be finished some time fairly soon. Whether it will prove any more acceptable though, is another matter.
Love,
Barbara
30 May. Whit Monday. Sitting in the sun reading Beverley Nichols’ ‘defence’ of Syrie Maugham. Made me laugh – people lying ill in the Dorchester and dying in Claridges. It might be a joke, a pastiche of the 20s written by Sandy Wilson. My own story judiciously edited from these notebooks would be subtler and more amusing.
June. Greece. 610 783 (Henry’s telephone number; he is in Athens). It seemed strange after more than 30 years to be driving with him again. Heard cuckoo in Delphi. Sensational ride to Lamia through the mountains – pass of Thermopylae. As we get down into the straight road to Lamia after the slow grinding climbs and descents, the driver (who looks like a younger, benevolent Stalin) sounds his horn in triumphant paeans and the radio is blaring full blast. Lamia. Plastic doves are being sold in the square and on the back corner of the Hotel Achillia there is a stork’s or pelican’s nest with young. The conductor on the bus sniffs a red carnation, two elderly men sit at a table with a gardenia between them.
My dream about R. We are driving along somewhere in his car when I see he is obviously too drunk to drive so I say ‘You shouldn’t have let him get like this.’ Then I pick R. up in my arms and he turns into a cat.
8 July. A disappointment for the Father at Farm Street? The voice of a lady telephoning to ask the time of the evening meal ‘on behalf of Father Stefanizyn who is with me’ [at the I. A.I.].
30 July. When I was out there arrived 12 beautiful deep pink roses from Constance Spry with a tender note. The roses were tight buds and have gradually unfolded till they are now enormous and flat, almost like peonies. Now he [Richard] has gone to Spain.
31 August. After a wet depressing day yesterday I have decided on a period of silence (by me at any rate) with a possible approach in September (to get Jumble).
15 September. After the Beardsley Exhibition at the V&A, walking along that endless tunnel to South Kensington station, I thought, why this is ‘behaviour’ – and I had said, perhaps even written: ‘where does "behaviour" begin and end?’
23–25 September. Malvern [staying with Muriel Maby]. At the Writers’ Circle Dinner. Margaret Drabble in a beautiful short flowered dress with long sleeves. Some in long glittering brocades. All with neat little ‘evening bags’ – only B.P. with her black leather day handbag.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
Brooksville Avenue
12 December 1966
Dearest Bob,
Anthony Powell’s newest was a great comfort to me when I read it recently – a beautiful book! Poor Richard was very fond of Iris Murdoch’s Unicorn which you couldn’t finish. As for news of Richard, I fear it is all over now (it makes me sad to write this) – he did get in touch once but I think it was only because he and Maurice wanted to get rid of some jumble (which we were of course delighted to have, but still …?). Life has its farcical moments and perhaps my sense of humour is greater than his. Perhaps my sardonic tongue has sent him away or he has just lost interest, the latter probably. How well I know that feeling of ‘embarrassment’ you speak of – racking one’s brains for something to say!
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
30 December 1966
Dearest Bob,
I’m so glad you liked An Object For a Walk and hope you will write and tell Jock so, as I’m sure he must be a little depressed by the meagre reviews and lack of enthusiasm for it. Naturally I could detect bits of myself in Flora and Hestha (strange spelling). Poor Henry [Harvey], what an inspiration he has been.
Richard gave me a nice lunch before Christmas at the eleventh hour, as it were, and we got on quite well. I don’t imagine we shall see anything of him in 1967, but I might ask you and him to dinner in the summer. All I want now is peace to write my unpublished novels.
Love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
11 January 1967
Dear Philip,
Just a note to thank you for the kind message about my novels on your Christmas card (a very nice one, with foxes) – it did cheer me up. I doubt if I shall ever publish another now though I certainly am at work on something – perhaps the ideal state to be in, never finishing (‘ Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss’ etc). I did revise and improve the one you saw but still haven’t managed to get any publisher to take, and at the moment it is lying on top of a cupboard in my room. Perhaps with the spring I may try it somewhere else.
I am surrounded by work, which is perhaps why I have broken off to write this. An excessive number of books on Africa coming out and the April number of the journal about to go to press … you will know about that cosily full in-tray.
With all good wishes for this year,
Yours ever,
>Barbara
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
16 February 1967
Dearest Bob,
A flat with a lift doesn’t seem quite what I had imagined you living in. It was rather the large decaying old Brazilian-style mansion, though I don’t think you ever said anything to suggest quite that. Bright yellow curtains in the bedroom(s) – how far from the anthropologist in the rest house in the twenties!
I met John Ballard [an anthropologist] once and I think he was rather shocked when I showed him a rather chaotic collection of Intelligence Reports we have at the I.A.I., and when he suggested mildly that it would be nice to have a list of them, I said roughly that there was certainly no hope of that. It might be a nice job to do on those long dusty August afternoons this year, perhaps, waiting for you to come to take me to tea at the Kardomah, but I have been so busy these last months and still am. All the same it has helped me overcome the depression that occasionally threatens when I think of nobody wanting to publish my novels, and my total ‘failure’ (if that’s the word) with Richard. Trying to understand people and leaving them alone and being ‘unselfish’ and all that jazz has only the bleakest of rewards – precisely nothing! Now I am incapable of taking any action at all, which is just as well.
Much love,
Barbara
17 May. Hazel and I recalled Dryden living in Fetter Lane, perhaps writing Absalom and Achitophel in the place where our [I.A.I.] Library now stands.
28 May. Lying in bed with migraine or something like it. The best things – life, health, freedom from misery. Hilary was ill too, so after a light supper we welcomed Sir Francis Chichester back [from his round-the-world voyage] with brandy and dry biscuits.
7 June. A Corot birthday card from Skipper with affectionate message. Then the next day a long tortuous letter from Mollie Lightbourn explaining that it was late because she forgot to post it on the 1st, as Richard instructed her. I wrote a cool friendly p. c. back. A real B. Pym situation. Then today a card to us both from Richard in Elba. Perhaps one could be friendly again – yet I feel like a cat that’s been offered a dish of plain Kit-e-Kat and wonders if it really wants that.
7 July. Oxford with Bob. Pusey House. Lunch at the Randolph. Pitt-Rivers Museum to look at cross-bows (all dusty and locked away). Blackwells. Writing p.c.s in the garden of Rhodes House then St Stephen’s House (locked chapel and overgrown garden) tea in Henley on the way back. Then I let fly about Richard which rather spoiled things then and later in the evening, so that the thought of him has made my ‘nervous indigestion’ pain return. But only temporarily I hope.
‘Top of the Pops’. ‘A Whiter shade of Pale’. Sad Bach-like tune, but to see it is a kind of nightmare, the dark brooding youth playing the organ and the vocal sung by a man in full Chinese dress even to the pigtail. Decadent and horrible.
9 July. In the self-service, a monk doesn’t manage his tray too well so the grey-haired woman table-clearer has to help him.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
9 August 1967
Dearest Bob,
These long lonely August afternoons are ideal for receiving visitors when one is dozing over proofs. The other day in a fit of boredom I nearly telephoned Richard for a bit of conversation but then I was afraid he might feel awkward and that I might not be able to think of anything to say, so I didn’t. So unflattering to feel that a person really doesn’t ever want to see you again – I don’t think it’s ever happened to me before quite like this! Now, alas, I am too old to change myself but shall just be more cautious in future – not allowing myself to get fond of anybody.
Much love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
7 December 1967
Dear Philip,
I hope you will have been having a good term and that your new Library extension has grown a few feet. I remember you mentioned it some time ago. There is something Ibsenish about it, or perhaps the idea of it, though I imagine you won’t have to climb to the top or anything alarming like that. Lots of books to put in it, of course, and endlessly proliferating bibliographies. Our Institute is at this moment organising a biblio. conference in Nairobi – talk about ‘Some Problems of…’!
Did you see in the chat about the Arts Council awards today that Edward Candy is a woman! I was rather disappointed, having pictured this rather nice sensitive amusing man – I think Strokes of Havoc is better than Parents’ Day and agree that the influence of Ivy Compton-Burnett is too strong. Perhaps ‘she’ will grow out of it. In about ten years’ time, perhaps somebody will be kind enough to discover me, living destitute in cat-ridden squalor, and recommend me for one of the grants, if there is still an Arts Council then.
The new book I mentioned [The Sweet Dove Died] really is new and I have finished the first draft. It will need some pruning and sharpening before I dare try it on a publisher, if I ever do. The friend who has read it thinks it almost a sinister and unpleasant book, which may be all to the good. I didn’t try to make it so, but tended to leave out boring cosiness and concentrate on the darker side. (Now you will wonder what on earth it is about – in the main, the relationship of an older woman with a younger man.)
The Faustina novel I did prune and improve quite a lot but have now put aside – I may take it out again but I feel the subject and all those clergy could never be sympathetically considered by any publisher now. By the way Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women are to be modestly reissued by a reprint firm, Chivers of Bath, who do a lot for libraries, where there is apparently still some demand for these two. Next summer is when they should be available.
I haven’t asked at all about your writing because you said you weren’t – but I hope that was temporary?
Yours ever,
Barbara
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
9 February 1968
Dearest Bob,
Are you beginning to experience ‘Some problems of a review editor’? It makes one almost hate people when they don’t send in reviews, I find, and I have my own private black list on which it is very terrible to be.
Hilary’s book [Songs of Greece: a companion for travellers, publ. Sunday Times] is very pretty – you can’t buy it except by ordering it through the Sunday Times – I should think she may send you a copy. So clever of her to have done it – she is waiting anxiously for Jock’s reaction. Francis King is very good, I think – The Last of the Pleasure Gardens very upsetting – Japanese ones fascinate me – The Waves Behind the Boat, excellent except for rather melodramatic ending. Jock says he has another coming, all about a prep school and full of cruelty (I probably told you). I am still going on with something, trying to make it less cosy without actually putting in the kind of thing that would be beyond my range (keep that and quote it in my biography, young man from the University of Texas!).
Why you shouldn’t get a job at an English university when your time in Lagos is up I can’t imagine. Unless, of course, you intend to become a clergyman. You thought perhaps that I might have retained some idealised vision of the clergy and perhaps in a sense I still do, just as I still even now at my age tend to believe what people tell me – it’s just a quality in oneself. But I am under no illusion about church people, on the whole, and the dullness and pettiness and dreariness of all the things a clergyman would have to do. Chaplain to a girls’ school, perhaps? Probably the only kind that have such a thing now would be a fashionable Roman (of course) Catholic boarding school, where the Duke of Norfolk’s daughters went, maybe.
I ripped this letter out of the typewriter because I thought I heard D.F. outside my door, but it was only the carpenter come to do some repairs! Still, the page was nearly finished anyway.
Much love,
Barbara
17 July. Dublin. In Molesworth St why should there be a notice to say ‘Marmalade For Sale’ in the window of the Hibernian Church Missionary Society?
The lone American lady drinking crême de menthe on the rocks to match her emerald ring and the other ladies so old and preserved enjoying exotic cocktails in the bar of the Great Southern Hotel Killarney.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
18 August 1968
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for your letter and the photograph of the new Library which I have studied with interest, noting particularly the opulent looking cars parked on the campus (or do they belong to the builders?). Also interesting is a shadowy figure in the foreground – ? the spirit of the Librarian?
I read about your sit-in. One wonders if all students would feel they had to have one. I of course saw it all in comfort on TV, which made it even more confused, especially when the foreign students used such phrases as (here I must consult my notebook) ‘infiltration of negative elements in social unity’.
I wonder if you have been on holiday yet – I’ve had a pleasant few days in Ireland in May, with good weather – Dublin, Galway and Sligo – Yeats’ grave and Lissadell – terribly sad decaying house where Constance Markiewicz was brought up and the Gore-Booths show one round. I urge everyone to go there because I feel they need the money, and it has a melancholy charm (and nowhere to have tea).
If you would really like to read my novel, of course I should be very pleased. My lending copy awaits you and I’ll send it on receipt of a postcard or other intimation. I’m afraid it isn’t going to get published easily, if at all. I sent it to Longmans, having an introduction to John Guest there who also read An Unsuitable Attachment, but last week he returned it … ‘fiction market increasingly difficult’ etc. etc. Doesn’t think anybody would buy it – only more elegantly expressed than that. Perhaps it isn’t really sinister and unpleasant at all, and it does lack a central character with whom one can ‘identify’. Maybe I have lost the knack of writing altogether – it’s so hard to judge, and loyal friends have enjoyed it. I shall of course try a few more publishers – not Faber, I think, not wishing to embarrass poor Charles Monteith who was so kind (or you!).
I’ve written more about it than I meant to and left little space for an intelligent discussion on the Predicament of the Novelist in 1968. I haven’t read Melinda or the new James Baldwin or the new Edna O’Brien but probably shall when I can get them from the library, out of curiosity and jealousy.
Yours,
Barbara
20 August. Philip Larkin sent me a photograph of his new Library extension. Was ever a stranger photo sent by a man to a woman (in a novel she might be disappointed).
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
9 September 1968
Dear Philip,
I am sending The Sweet Dove Died (a thriller about the American Presidential Election?) for you to read and hope it may give you some amusement. Criticisms welcome, of course (one says bravely) or perhaps the whole thing is hopeless for this day and age. (At least it isn’t in dialect). Chatto have it at the moment (3 weeks ago). I shall go on trying if they send it back.
Did any poem come to you in Sutherland? On the moors, or the rocky coast, or in the hotel lounge? I should like to think one did come.
Yours ever,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
20 October 1968
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for returning the MS of the S.D.D. and for your most interesting and helpful criticisms. Nobody has ever told me what was really wrong with the book and I felt there must be something. It suffered through starting off as one thing and ending up as another, the penalty of having so little free time and energy that continuity is lost and one’s ideas change in the meantime. I started not at all in sympathy with Leonora, who began by being a minor character, but as the book progressed I got more interested in her and really enjoyed writing about her best in the end. I should really have scrapped Rose etc except as minor characters and concentrated on Leonora, James, Humphrey, and Ned (who came in as an afterthought). I wonder if I could do anything with it on the lines you suggest. I feel uncertain at the moment and have rather lost confidence in myself. It would be different if I had more time. As it is, I only write at weekends or on holiday. Yes, I do ‘go in’ every day and as one gets older one gets more tired, so that evenings are spent lazily watching the Telly rather than writing. What a mixed blessing that great invention is!
I really owe you two letters for I never thanked you for the brief, bitter, amusing one about your holiday and the horror of the single rooms. On Thy Belly would be a fine title for an autobiography. I could write Dust Shalt Thou Eat, which might be no more than a guide to restaurants in the luncheon-voucher belt of E.C. 4.
How good of you to speak to William Plomer like that! I saw him reading the lesson at Wren Howard’s Memorial Service in September but I hurried away afterwards and didn’t speak to anyone. I felt it was really in memory of the house of Cape as it used to be. All the same, if my two unpublished books really do have serious flaws in them perhaps the outlook is not so unpromising for me after all. I could do better in my old age, if I haven’t given up by then.
I hope your students will be reasonably well behaved this year, though that is a lot to hope for. I think John Lennon so repellent-looking now – like a very plain middle-aged Victorian female novelist, with that long hair. I used to like the Beatles once and I still like their songs if I don’t have to look at them.
Yes, I have two cats so their ways are known to me – one tortoiseshell and one black and white. We always had them at home, but couldn’t in London till we got a house with a garden
I do hope you will get something better to read than unpublished, unpublishable novels! Let me thank you again for telling me (like D.H.L.) what my novel was really about, and apologise for this boring letter, but I felt I wanted to write soon.
With all good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
7 February 1969
Dear Philip,
Your poem in The Sunday Times was powerful and haunting, the falling of those leaden words – I cut it out and put it in The Whitsun Weddings, though of course I hope I shall live to see another volume in which it will be printed.
I wish now I had thought of becoming a poet – and now I can see that I have let myself in for implying that a poem is less work than a novel. Please don’t take it amiss! Anyway, if it comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree … or whatever Keats said.
I am struggling to improve that Leonora novel but make slow progress. Anyway I like having something to think about and occasionally write a bit of. I have seen, or rather received, two copies of my Library Association reprint of Excellent Women. It looks rather nice, though I can’t bring myself to read it. I get comfort from a rereading of Anthony Powell and Charlotte Brontë (not Jane Eyre).
Very best wishes,
Barbara
15 May. At the Royal Society of Literature to hear a talk by Elizabeth Bowen on the novelist and his characters. Perhaps the most noteworthy thing that one, as it were, brought away was the idea of L.P. Hartley as a young man reviewing Elizabeth Bowen’s first book for the Spectator, living in Camden Road. How different now in Rutland Gate! Perhaps I could have got up and protested, made a scene, have had to be ‘removed’ to everyone’s embarrassment when Elizabeth Bowen seemed to praise Emily Brontë at the expense of Charlotte. ‘Who was that woman who made a scene?’ someone would ask. And nobody would know – only that I had been introduced by Philip Larkin, and that might have brought shame on him.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
27 May 1969
Dear Philip,
I did go to the Roy. Soc. Lit. (how do Librarians abbreviate it, when they have to?) and was most interested to set foot in there and hear Elizabeth Bowen give a very good and interesting talk, and see L.P. Hartley very much occupying the chair against a background of dusty dark blue velvet curtains. And who were all those ladies in beautiful hats, not all Fellows, I’m sure, though many of them looked as if they ought to have been. I was put in the second row (having arrived only just before it was due to start) so had little opportunity to look around me, but I found I was sitting just in front of Elizabeth Taylor, whom I know, who had come with her husband. Eliz. Bowen said that people never recognise themselves in novels (even if they have been ‘put in’) but I think one sometimes makes up a character and then he or she appears in the flesh, like a man now working in our Library, who is so like ‘Mervyn’ in my unpublished one, and even speaks of ‘Mother’.
I went to the unveiling of the Byron memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey. There must have been lots of poets there but, apart from Day-Lewis, I recognised only politicians – Michael Foot and Bob Boothby! Afterwards, the friend I went with and I went to lunch at the Army and Navy Stores – perhaps not quite what one would have chosen as the perfect finish to a romantic and moving experience, but that area is not good for eating places.
We had a ‘Festschrift’ presentation to Daryll Forde a couple of weeks ago – he is retiring from University College London. A volume of essays had been contributed by his old students, called Man in Africa, published by Tavistock. Of course these occasions are never quite as one would make them in fiction, except that one prominent linguist was seen surreptitiously refilling his glass when the presentation was being made. I was also struck by the number of academic women who appeared to have made really no effort at all – obviously none of that agonised ‘But what shall I wear?’ – really an enviable detachment and when will one ever reach it?
I’ve finished a very rough re-doing of that Sweet Dove Died novel about Leonora etc, but what reader would want to identify herself with Leonora? If only one could write about Margaret Drabble-like characters! But I suppose I couldn’t have done, even when I was that age, so.… Perhaps the best thing to do now is to ‘write’ nothing but bibliographies.
All good wishes – Yours ever,
Barbara
31 July. Lunch at the Royal Commonwealth Society with Bob. In the restaurant all those clergymen helping themselves from the cold table, it seems endlessly. But you mustn’t notice things like that if you’re going to be a novelist in 1968-9 and the 70s. The posters on Oxford Circus station advertising Confidential Pregnancy Tests would be more suitable.
11 August. Visit to Jane Austen’s house with Bob. I put my hand down on Jane’s desk and bring it up covered with dust. Oh that some of her genius might rub off on me! One would have imagined the devoted female custodian going round with her duster at least every other day. Then to the site of Steventon Rectory the place of her birth – now a field overgrown with nettles and docks. We went into Steventon Church – very cool inside. Steventon Manor is deserted and overgrown, not beautiful but sad, almost romantic. Such enormous beech trees and that silence – a few miles away the road from Basingstoke to London and the traffic roaring by.
15 August. Longmans returned The Sweet Dove – ‘well written’ – but what’s the use of that.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
19 September 1969
Dear Philip,
Thank you so much for two delightful holiday postcards – one from Norwich (bird with no lion above it) and the other from the West of Ireland. I hope your room in Eire was more comfortable than Norwich seems to have been, though perhaps it’s no use the single traveller expecting anything but the worst, as you seem to have found. I’ve twice been to Ireland, 1967 and 1968, and love it. Everyone is so nice you and lots of cups of tea and Guinness, not to mention the beauty of scenery, fuschia hedges and arum lilies. I’ve not been to the North, but was glad to see that Queen’s Univ. Belfast have had the discernment to give you a doctorate. Many congratulations! I cut the piece out of The Telegraph where it appeared in Peterborough but I haven’t yet decided which of your poems it would go best in – I mean, as a resting-place, the Toad work rather than Faith Healing, perhaps?
My sister and I had a very good holiday in Greece, late May–early June. One felt a bit ‘guilty’ going there but Robert Liddell still lives in Athens and I’ve got to the age when I feel I must see friends rather than make protests. Robert wrote the Times obituary of Dame Ivy. Apparently she has left him part of her residuary estate which has touched and pleased him. He had a sentimental, un-Ivyish feeling about it. Yes, those obituaries, as you say! I was shocked at Pamela Hansford-J. turning up half an hour late for dinner and should have imagined that for somebody of that generation one would surely have been most careful to arrive punctually!
I’m glad to see your Jazz writings are to be collected, though I suppose I’d have preferred that Library novel or another volume of poems. I have nearly finished my revising and ‘improving’ of that novel I showed you about a year ago about Leonora. I have cut out a lot of the characters, ruthlessly suppressed (or tried to) all ‘cosiness’ and am now struggling with the last difficult chapters, which are new. Then I shall have to go through it all again to see what further improvements can be made. And after all that will there be any point in offering it to a publisher? One really does wonder! Still I suppose it’s a nice ‘hobby’ for me, like knitting. Next I shall write a lighter academic one and perhaps after that one about the decay of the Anglican church. Some Tame Gazelle has just been done in the Portway Library Association reprints.
We continue to have trouble in staffing our Library at the Institute. A Ghanaian we had was not a success and spent a large part of his day conducting endless telephone calls in his native language (Fanti, I think). Hope you are all right in that respect!
With all good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
10 December 1969
Dear Philip,
It was extremely kind of you to ‘say a word’ to James Wright of Macmillan about my book and I have just taken it along there. (I should explain that their new premises are so near to where I work that it is possible to walk along at lunch time with a manuscript in a shopping bag, thus avoiding the expense and frustration of the pre-Christmas post.) I am not very optimistic about the book’s chances though it is improved, I think, and perfectly publishable if only somebody would have the courage to be unfashionable. I saw a most depressing TV programme on Saturday night about the dire state of fiction publishing. But I am not discouraged really, only fatalistic. I can now see how one might be led to have delusions of grandeur about one’s work, or to develop persecution mania. You say that you are never ‘seen’ anywhere – and I can say that I write but don’t get published!
Thank you very much for your last letter – written in October, when you had just got what sounds like a very splendid ‘new’ car – Vanden Plas Princess, indeed, with Rolls Engine! Hope she continues to please you.
Our work grows all the time. One of my tasks is to cope with review books sent for Africa and I have long discussions with Professor Forde who to send them to. Some of our academics might be surprised at the way they are judged when the criterion is whether they are quick and reliable reviewers. But perhaps what is to me in my narrow sphere a virtue, appears very dreary in the big world, like being ‘a good husband and father’ or ‘a dutiful son’.
I hope nobody has asked you to act the part of Fr Christmas in your new Dr’s robes. They do sound most reasonable at £35. What material are they made of? And is there a floppy hat to go with them? A pity you can’t be photographed in them for your 1969 Christmas card – or perhaps you have been? People are too modest nowadays.
Yours ever,
Barbara
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
11 December 1969
Dearest Bob,
The article [‘How Pleasant to Know Miss Pym’ by R. Smith] is most gratifying and soothing to my wounded ego, but providing suitable quotes is going to be difficult. Could you not give me a few clues, e.g. the bit where … and then I would cheerfully copy them out. Hazel may be able to help. I wasn’t offended by anything – though curious to know just how many ‘it so happened’s’ you found – and what you meant by woman’s page or magazine style – making Wilmet say ‘sweet’ instead of ‘agreeable’. The bits I might think most quoteable might not be your choice. But how nice of you to write it and it would be wonderful for both of us if Professor Jeffares would take it for Ariel magazine. Is he the man who edited the paperback selection of Yeats that I have? A far far cry.…
Love,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
26 January 1970
Dearest Bob,
I fear Macmillan will not take The Sweet Dove, but only (they say) because it seems a risk commercially. I have never had a more flattering letter about my work (or even review) than the one James Wright wrote about it. He praised my ‘perfection of taste’ so you can see what is wrong, especially when you read the reviews in the Sundays any week. But how can one be different? Anyway I am going to send it round rather than let it lie at home. And I have even started my academic one about a provincial university [this novel never got beyond the first draft].
‘Miss Austen’ is wrong, of course, because Cassandra was the elder and Jane would be Miss Jane Austen. However, Miss Pym is correct for me if you are going in for that sort of thing.
St Lawrence’s is in the red and numbers dropping all the time. But I hate the idea of ‘meeting in people’s houses’ rather than going to church, as I have seen suggested. Just imagine Sung Mass at 40 Brooksville and Minerva jumping up on the altar and Tom sniffing the sacred vessels.
Much love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
1 February 1970
Dear Philip,
I was so delighted to get a copy of All What Jazz and I’m sure I shall gain much knowledge as well as pleasure from it. It’s good of you to remember me! You look somehow different from the poet and novelist in the photograph on the jacket – something in the expression of the eyes or is that too far-fetched? How beautifully arranged the books are, presumably at 32 Pearson Park.
You have sent me so many books since we first, as it were, ‘met’ and I wish I could make some return. That is why I am sending you now this bound copy of A Glass of Blessings – perhaps you can regard it as a bibliographical curiosity, if nothing else, and it is the only such copy in existence.
James Wright couldn’t have been nicer or more flattering about my rewritten version of The Sweet Dove Died but said Macmillan couldn’t offer to publish as it seemed a risky commercial venture. Thank you very much for mentioning my name to him. At least I got a little confidence from his praise, i.e. it appears I can still write even if my type of book is no longer publishable. I have now sent the MS to a friend of mine, Dorothy Eden, an immensely successful writer of thrillers, ‘gothic’ and historical novels, and she is going to ask the advice of her agent, as she has also read and liked it. In the meantime Cape have got Portway Reprints to do Jane and Prudence and Less Than Angels in their Library reprints. They did STG and Ex. Women very nicely.
At the office I am surrounded by books about Africa, many of them ‘marginal’ to our field, and increasing numbers of bibliographies! Daryll Forde, who retired as Prof, of Anthropology at Univ. Coll. London this summer, now comes in to us every day (he is our Director) and makes lots more work, so that everyone has got rather fractious. We are hoping to get some Ford Foundation money to start an information and research center (I’m sure it should have American spelling) but we don’t know yet if it will materialise.
Yours ever,
Barbara
40 Brooksville Avenue
21 March 1970
Dear Philip,
Easter is nearly here and I haven’t yet bought any new clothes – all this anxiety about the skirt length – for people of my age it will be quite all right to wear things that seemed a little too long and are now the perfect mid-length. Did you see the picture of M. Drabble, Olivia M. and others in The Sunday Times? A pitiful group they looked – and what length were they wearing! Bringing culture to the North.
I hope you have been pleased with the reviews of All What Jazz. The ones I’ve seen have been good, though obviously you have shocked some reviewers deeply by your attitude! But of course I agree with you, though I wouldn’t know about jazz. The introduction set me thinking back into my own girlhood – and that winding up of the portable gramophone – and the records – ours were mainly of the bands of the day – Jack Hylton and Jack Payne, and perhaps the odd Ellington – and my own favourite of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence doing that scene from Private Lives. And of course we had ukuleles – that was surely before your time!
While on the nostalgic track – how wonderful to go to All Souls for six months – and may you have absolutely no worries, if such a state is possible. The Oxford Book [P.L. edited the Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse (1973)] must be a bit nagging, though. How on earth do you decide what to put in? Perhaps it’s a question of taking out poems that haven’t stood ‘the test of time’ (sad, that) and substituting others or do you have to start again from scratch? Helen Gardner is your co-editor, I believe [H.G. edited the New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972)]. What happens if you disagree? As for revisiting places of one’s youth and visiting places one never went to – perhaps the last is best. I wonder if Elliston’s is now full of well dressed ladies having coffee mid-morning? I think the warm green-muffled Cumnor Hills were never as Arnold saw them. But Bagley Wood – ah … I think it belongs to St John’s, doesn’t it, and will have been preserved, bluebells and all.
Thank you for your sympathy about the SDD. Hodder were much of the opinion of James Wright at Macmillan – thought it very well written etc. in perfect taste (damning word?) but said that such books only sold in very small editions. Still, we will try it elsewhere. I certainly don’t think it’s worse than any of my others, but the main characters are perhaps not very sympathetic.
As for the reprinting – it is not Cape themselves who do this. They merely negotiated for me with Chivers of Bath who reprint (in very limited editions) for Libraries, the books not being on sale. The rights do revert to me when the books have been out of print a certain length of time, but what could I do with them myself if I hadn’t got another publisher to do a new novel? It seemed best to let Chivers do them, so that at least they would be available in Libraries and the name of Barbara Pym not totally sunk in oblivion.…
After that I must come to a different sort of end.
All good wishes,
Barbara
Easter Sunday. In St Lawrence’s a fine polish on the bird (sprayed with Pledge by Hilary) especially on neck and claws. In the Hall a strong smell of tomcat, which is, after all, one of the smells of spring.
16 April. Sweet Dove rejected yet again (by Macdonald). Shall call it Leonora by Tom Crampton and send it out again.
29 April. What strikes one in going through the old I.A.I. Fellowship files – the difficulties over marriage – almost like entering a celibate priesthood. H. Beemer (1935) ‘I think that the proper course for Miss Beemer would have been to raise the whole question with the Council before getting married. We have no precedent to guide us in a matter of this kind.’
The terrible illnesses – malaria, chiefly.
The low salary – £20 a month, £30 in the field.
Wife to live on £3 a week in England.
Frobenius ‘behaved very badly’ – what did he do?
3 July. Nellie’s last day at the Kardomah. She got £5 a week part-time and had cleared the tables for 22 years. In the heat of June her remark to a man customer ‘Oh, look at you perspiring’. The Kardomah closed July 3rd 1970.
Novel. Scene by scene. Write what researchers and biographers write of a person’s life and then what really did happen (rather like The Heroes of Clone [by Margaret Kennedy]). Or first write the short biography, then write it again filled out and true. Beginning, perhaps, in 1939.
29 May [by bus to Athens]. Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia. People in the coach: Young loving couple – he slightly Che Guevara; Irish couple – lady had too many changes of clothing and wore unbecoming beige slacks; elderly couple – tough know-all man; Katharine Wilkinson and her father – very nice; ‘The wandering Scholar’ – slightly odd, had diarrhoea; the Old Roué – military type, always at the bottle; Olde World Edwardian man about town; Australian couple (she of Greek origin) with little boy; Chris and Marie – Cockney couple.
3 June. Athens. Pension Penelope: It is a fine old house now somewhat in need of repair and redecoration. The inhabitants seem to be mostly elderly ladies, girl students and rather impoverished English tourists. A rather Katherine Mansfield sort of place – plastic bowls of washing soaking in the bathroom, eating in rooms, and every inhabitant has his or her own little corner of chaos. Our room has a stunning view of the Acropolis. A family of cats on the roof opposite.
4 June. In the evening we went to a taverna with Jock and Guido. Guido comes from Carrara and his family has a marble firm. Perhaps we could order our tombstones from him. When we got back to the Penelope I looked in my bag and saw that my passport wasn’t there! Horror!
5 June. Went to the British Consulate about the passport. ‘ I’m afraid this is going to ruin your holiday,’ said the man in a satisfied tone. I decided to go to places where I might have left it and finally ran it to earth in the American Express. Oh the relief!
Mycenae and Epidaurus. Found the Church of St Spyridon. There was an ikon of St Barbara (all silver) so I burned a candle to her as a thanks for finding my passport. Demoted she may be by Rome, perhaps, she is not by the Greek Orthodox.
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
31 July 1970
Dear Philip,
Thank you for a beautiful card from the Hebrides – I dare say you are still there plodding through Scottish verse and Drinkwater. The latter reminds me so much of my schooldays in the twenties, though he was nothing like as popular as Rupert Brooke and Charles Hamilton Sorley.
Your going to All Souls [to work on The Oxford Book] suggests a plot for a novel though I doubt if I could write it. Middle-aged unmarried female don waits eagerly for the autumn when a friend of her Oxford days (the well-known poet, librarian and whatever else you like) is coming to spend a year at All Souls (doing some kind of research, perhaps). At first it is all delightful and they go for beautiful autumnal walks on Shotover (? can one still do this) but unknown to her he has been visiting a jazz club in the most squalid part of the town (where is that now?) and has fallen in love with a nineteen year old girl … the ending could be violent if necessary – or he could just go off with the girl, leaving the female don reading Hardy’s poems. Perhaps it is a novel by Rachel Trickett, the first part, anyway?
I have no news of a publisher for The Sweet Dove and I don’t think any one will ever publish it, though I go on sending it round. It is a wonder to me now that I ever published anything and I can hardly believe that I did! The article in Ariel could appear this autumn, but if it doesn’t apparently it can’t be till next autumn, I don’t know why and neither does its author! Please don’t feel guilty for not having written about me yourself – you have so often encouraged and cheered me, not to speak of amused, in countless ways, and that is better than anything.
My sister has bought a car and I am going to learn to drive. I wonder if I shall be able to do it? I did learn years ago but haven’t kept it up and things are very different now, as people gleefully tell me. So I can but try, at the driving school which appears to be run by an Irishman – It would be a comfort if the car could be blessed at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Quex Road, Kilburn. I will let you know how I get on.
I suppose I ought to be grieved and shocked at your Library’s withdrawal from SCOLMA, but I am not a bibliographer at heart so received the news without any emotion but a slight pleasure. The trouble with bibliographies about Africa is that they are getting so enormous that the quarterly one we publish in Africa is crowding out original work, such as articles and even book reviews. I long for the old innocent days when the bibliography was 8 or 10 pages instead of the 16–20 it now is!
I have had a week’s holiday so far (in that good June weather) and hope to take some more in September. We picnicked just outside Iris Murdoch’s village (Steeple Aston) but nothing sensational happened. Another time we got stuck in Woodstock and an L.P. Hartley-like chauffeur wearing dark glasses came to our aid.
Best wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
10 August. Had my third driving lesson from Peter – grinding round Willesden and Cricklewood in the rain in second gear.
20 August. If you were ever romantic, and, of course, you can’t possibly be now, at your age, imagine lunching with somebody and him urging you to drink most of the wine because it makes him feel so sleepy. Tall Irish Murdoch waitress, perhaps a student doing a holiday job.
31 August. It seems unnatural not to be writing bits for novels in one’s notebook. What sort of novel could I write now? A gothic novel – I thought of this as I made my daily visit to the nectarine tree, spread out against the south-facing wall at the top of the garden. They seem old-fashioned fruit with their hard red cheeks, not soft and downy like a peach. Why shouldn’t it be a modern gothic novel. What are the ingredients. A heroine, but much more of a heroine than Mildred or Wilmet. A setting. A hero. Mystery. A modern version of Jane Eyre?
6 September. Bob and I met at Green Park station to go to the Chapel Royal (11.15 Sung Eucharist), but when we got there found it was closed until October. ‘And you’re too late for the Guards’ Chapel,’ said the man. So we made our way to St James Piccadilly where Matins had started. The rector (the Rev. William Pye Baddeley – brother of Hermione and Angela) was in the middle of reading the 2nd lesson in a modern version, where Mary Magdalen breaks the box of precious ointment over Jesus.… ‘Here endeth that perfectly lovely lesson,’ he declared. The congregation was mostly elderly and well dressed. We prayed for visitors to London, especially those from the USA and there were some dollar bills in the plate.… Then we had tea at the Ritz (which seemed to be the only place open round there) sage green and pink upholstery. But the reclining nymph at the fountain is golder and brassier than in Anthony Powell’s The Acceptance World where she is bronze. Still the vaguely Latin-American looking people and the heat very fierce (central heating on a hot summer’s day). But the waiter who brought our tea was Irish and it was hot and strong.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
6 November 1970
Dearest Bob,
I am feeling encouraged because The Sweet Dove was very nearly accepted by Peter Davies, and I sent it completely out of the blue with no indication that I had ever written anything else. One of the directors (Mark Barty-King) wrote me a long letter, quoting five readers’ reports, some of which were very flattering. It was ‘very accomplished’ and ‘a minor tour de force’ but the general opinion was that it wasn’t quite powerful enough or plotted enough to appeal to enough readers. I have had to write back and reveal my secret, but I don’t suppose they can change their minds now. One of the less kind reports said that it was clever-clever and decadent – that made me feel about 30 years younger!
The Bishop’s chaplain [Fr Jennings] has now materialised and it is all a bit like A Glass of Blessings. He hasn’t moved into the house in Kingswood Avenue yet because it is in a filthy condition and it needs to have £5,000 spent on it (surely it can’t be 5,000, but that is what he said). He is going to have one of the front downstairs rooms made into a garage and is going to have ordinands living in the house. I gather he is director of the ordinands, if that is the correct title, as well as chaplain to Graham Willesden, who is no longer a Suffragan but Bishop of a new province which seems to include us and Hazel, far west in Ealing.
Love,
Barbara
9 November. I visit the Library at LSE. Waiting down below at the enquiry desk – the rough students with longhair and strange one-sex clothes make me feel old and vulnerable.
What is wrong with being obsessed with trivia? Some have criticised The Sweet Dove for this. What are the minds of my critics filled with? What nobler and more worthwhile things?
26 November. At the National Portrait Gallery with Hazel to hear the readings about Andrew Marvell. Not ‘My love is of a birth so rare’ – but, of course, ‘Had we but world enough and time’ – the audience of middle-aged and elderly ladies must surely have had the poem recited to them when young. I sat with bowed head as Robert Harris (himself a little too old) read it, but Hazel detected a triumphant smirk or two.
Reading Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Daisy Chain and see the echoes or rather foreshadowings of Ivy Compton-Burnett in it. Ivy would have made Dr May marry Meta Rivers and she would then have had an affair with Norman. Some patches of Ivy dialogue too. Oh that some idea might come to me. It is enjoyable and very readable.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
31 December 1970
Dearest Bob,
There was no Christmas service at St Lawrence’s which was rather sad, but of course there are plenty of nearby churches to go to. We went to St Anne’s. A nice service and the church was really warm. Next Sunday Fr Jennings will be back and he does feel the cold so and certainly lets one know it. We fear he is rather pampered but certainly the object of interest and amusement. It never does to ask after his health or he will tell you. Work is going on on his house. It was burgled recently and some coffee tables were stolen, also an ‘antique’ clock which had been given to one of his ordinands. When commiserated with, however, he said the clock was really rather a hideous Victorian thing and not at all to his own taste, which Hilary and I thought rather mean of him. Little, of course, does he realise who is drinking it all in!
Much love,
Barbara
22 April 1971. It amuses me to read in a review of Malcolm Muggeridge’s book about Mother Teresa that he describes Newman’s ‘Lead kindly light’ as ‘exquisite’. Not quite the word.
27 April. Morning at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. O little lump – almost a subject for a metaphysical poem. Conveniently opposite are an ABC café and a pub. I choose the latter (Private Bar). Two elderly ladies with light ale, coughing and cackling, and an Irish Landlord. Andrew Cruickshank said that in the 18th century there was moss growing round the high altar of St Paul’s cathedral. Can this be true?
To Bob Smith in Lagos
St Mary’s Hospital
Harrow Road
1 May 1971
Dearest Bob,
I don’t know how to prevent this letter being a shock to you, as it has been to me – because this time last week I never imagined I should be in hospital!
I discovered a lump on my left breast, immediately went to the doctor who got me in here for an examination next day, the day after I was taken into hospital, the next day they operated and now, two days later here I am writing to tell you about it.
Of course I couldn’t have chosen a worse time, with Hilary away in Greece, but everyone has been marvellous and all those clichés about one’s true friends are proved right. Hazel a tower of strength, Mrs P.C. coming round with grapes, my friends at the Institute rallying round.
You will have guessed that it was cancer and that was why they took away the left bosom. I can’t make out whether the other ladies here are breastless (like Amazons?) or have other things the matter with them. Everyone is so kind – the black hands and the white hands, so cool and firm and comforting.
Don’t worry about me, I am being well cared for.
Much love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
22 June 1971
Dear Philip,
Many thanks for your letter – also the note with your Christmas card – then came the postal strike and all those devious things we had to do (at the International African Institute) like giving letters to people to post in France and Belgium and various parts of Africa! I had imagined you having a lot of social life (the mantelpiece permanently dark with invitation cards) and wondered even if the plot of the novel I sketched out was coming true. You do seem to have worked hard – the (then) English Reading Room of the Bodleian has many sentimental memories for me – I can remember deliberately not going there for fear of seeing a certain person or to hope that my absence would be noticed. I do wonder which poems you will have chosen – how on earth do you know where to begin? I suppose that is settled beforehand.
I hope you won’t think I am taking my revenge on you for not having written, but now you will have to hear all about my operation! In fact, at this moment (in time, as people say) I am sitting in the garden in a rare burst of sunshine and am on convalescent leave, probably returning (gently) to work the week after next. I was in hospital the first three weeks in May having been rushed in for a sudden operation. Since there are no longer hushed voices when one speaks of it I’ll tell you that it was a breast cancer, luckily caught when very small so I hope there won’t be any recurrence though I suppose one mustn’t be over-optimistic. Now I am like the woman in that novel by Penelope Mortimer except that mine is the left side and hers was the right. Also, I’m about 25 years older which does make a difference – one minds much less about one’s physical beauty and of course it doesn’t show at all when one is dressed. It was my first visit to hospital and apart from the first few days of discomfort (and even that wasn’t very bad) I rather enjoyed the experience. To have a lovely rest, to have flowers and grapes and books brought to you and to be a centre of interest is not at all unpleasant! I found I even didn’t mind students looking at me. I had it done on the NHS but by luck I was put in a side ward which was as good as a private room – I used to mingle with people in the ward though and had a lot of talks – I discovered that all you need do is to make some enquiry and you will get a whole life story. I wonder if I could write a hospital novel, hardly a romance, I feel, nor yet Doctor in the House.
I cannot get anything published, though Peter Davies almost took the Leonora book. They thought they had discovered a new writer and, bearing that in mind, the readers’ comments were rather funny. Rather to my surprise I find I have nearly finished the first draft of another novel about a provincial university [never revised, unpublished] told by the youngish wife of a lecturer. It was supposed to be a sort of Margaret Drabble effort but of course it hasn’t turned out like that at all. The Ariel article is supposed to be coming out in October – I’ll let you know when it does, if it does, but it has actually been in proof.
I was interested to hear of your meeting Iris Murdoch and wonder if we shall find a character like you in her next novel. Obviously a novelist should cross question people, like the anthropologist in the field, but I’ve never been able to do that very much myself though I love finding out things about people in my own way.
I have lately taken to reading Charlotte M. Yonge. I’ve found much enjoyment and richness especially in The Pillars of the House, which is a very churchy one. What a wonderful length books were allowed to be in those days before the telly and all that!
What do you think of Maurice in the Sunday Times? Hard to tell from the rather mangled extracts but I look forward to reading it in its proper form, I wonder what could possibly be regarded as too daring to publish nowadays?
I hope all went well at the Library when you were absent and everything wasn’t left for you to decide (or perhaps you’d rather it was!). I am being quite gratifyingly missed at my work and the July Africa has come out 4 pages shorter than intended. Also the mystique of the advertisements has not been fathomed by anyone else trying to do my work. Yet I don’t really want to become embroiled again. It is all too easy to pass the days pleasantly doing not very much, but I suppose that’s convalescence.
With all good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
22 August. How splendid All Saints Margaret St is – close to 200 people there! I reckon when you compare it with the five to ten at St Lawrence’s it hardly seems to be the same religion. And yet, where two or three are gathered together.…
Bob is taking Joan to Walsingham to give thanks for her recovery. I gave thanks for mine quietly in my bed at St Mary’s Hospital, Harrow Road and at Brooksville Avenue, even in poor old St Lawrence’s.
30 October. Cats Protection League Bazaar, held in Westminster Cathedral Hall. A few men, perhaps 2 or 3, but the rest women and me as dotty as any of them. Tea in pink or blue plastic cups, not very hot. A woman sitting by the door collecting money just ‘for the cats’. She has a gentle face, wears slacks, voluminous coat and fine brown straw hat. Stuffed frog by her on table, but of no significance (at first I thought it was a raffle). This simple collecting was something, perhaps the only thing she could do.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
40 Brooksville Avenue
31 October 1971
Dearest Bob,
Thank you so much for having the copy of Ariel sent, it was lovely to see the article in print and I am so grateful to you for having written it and given me such pleasure. There are some rather good erudite articles about T.S. Eliot and ‘that sort of thing’. One might contribute an obscure note on something: ‘Mrs Widmerpool’s bridge-coat’, for example.
The event for us has been the closing of St Lawrence’s. It closed at the end of September without ceremony, but last Wednesday the Bishop of Willesden came and gave us a Sung Mass and quite a lot of people came. Since the closing we have been to St Mary Magdalene’s, Paddington. It has rather good music and quite an amusing vicar (dragging on a cigarette) and curate who live in a startlingly modern clergy house just opposite the church.
I have finished the first draft of a novel about a provincial university. The idea for it was inspired by that business of John Beattie and Rodney Needham in Africa [an academic wrangle] and the original version of Mrs Fisher’s Twilight Tales of the Black Baganda – there are also two characters in it rather like Richard and his mother, exiles from the Caribbean. Perhaps my immediate circle of friends will like to read it.
Much love,
Barbara
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
7 November 1971
Dear Philip,
I have made very good progress and when I went to hospital two weeks ago for a check-up they told me I needn’t come back for a year – so unless anything unforeseen happens I am clear of that! I am working nearly full time.
The article Robert Smith wrote about me in Ariel has now come out in the October number. ‘How Pleasant to Know Miss Pym’, it is called. On reading it, I wonder if that is what I am really like or my books. If you see it, tell me what you think! Perhaps somebody in the University of Calgary would care to buy some of my old notebooks in a few years’ time. (The Univ. of Calgary is connected with Leeds in the publishing of Ariel).
I still haven’t passed my driving test! But am due to take it for the 4th time on 19th November at 12.15 (at Hendon). I don’t know who the patron saint of such things is – possibly St Jude – or the demoted St Christopher? All middle-aged women fail their first test, my second was perhaps too soon after my being in hospital, my third I was not careful enough, but perhaps my fourth will be better if I am very careful. ‘All he wants is a safe ride.’ The examiners at Hendon are uniformly grey men; perhaps it is a breed, like customs officers.
I have no literary success to report. A reader at Barrie and Jenkins went so far as to admit that she had ‘enjoyed’ my book, but prospects of publication seem to get bleaker. In the meantime I will try to go on with the University one and maybe one day you may read it and advise me about it. But oh the effort of getting things finished. Did you see on the back of the Sunday Times today about the girl who is starting the Orlando Press, erotic books written by women for women? What can they possibly be like? (I shall look out for them with interest.)
I hope you are not feeling depressed (or won’t be when you get this letter). I’m not sure that I agree about memories always being unhappy or uncomfortable ones. I find as I get older that I tend to steer clear of any kind of memories or push them away, unless I want to call them up for any special reason. But when I’m unhappy or depressed I do find myself remembering ‘better times’, those good reviews of my novels etc. but that doesn’t make one any more cheerful – on the contrary, Nessun maggior dolore … and all that jazz! But now I want to pass my driving test and I want to publish another novel, and even to write another novel to my own satisfaction, so perhaps my mind is filled with all that, and I am lucky.
Our church has become ‘redundant’ and been closed! There’s something I should like to write about. Now I can go around from church to church with no particular attachment. Neither my sister nor I really want to get involved anywhere at the moment, having had enough of all that to last a long time.
Yours ever,
Barbara
10 November. Mr C in the Library – he is having his lunch, eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, a glass of milk near at hand. Oh why can’t I write about things like that any more – why is this kind of thing no longer acceptable? A failing novelist, but coming up to my 4th driving test on the 19th. Not that you won or lost but that you played the game. Only it doesn’t seem to work out like that. Slow, careful and safe.… All the same I failed. I had Mr Bloomfield again. But afterwards he was quite nice and cosy, like talking over one’s shortcomings with a priest after confession.
4 February 1972. Now that the possibility of being ‘buried’ in the country looms, one goes about one’s bit of London taking it all in. But so much is being pulled down, especially between Fleet St and Aldwych (by King’s College). And Gamage’s is to be closed and pulled down. Oh unimaginable horror!
Lunch in the Kingsway Kardomah reading The Church Times (even that has gone off – no Answers to Correspondents). A tiny little elderly woman clears the tables – only about 5 ft high or less so that one nearly knocks her over with one’s tray. Her little wrinkled claw-like hand comes towards me with a J-cloth to wipe the counter. Go away old crone, I want to say. The best place to sit is in the window, watching the cars come down Kingsway and stopping at the zebra crossings. The only places to have lunch now: Kingsway Kardomah, Holborn Kardomah (The Dutch House), Gay Fayre opposite the Prudential – very squashed but one could sit in the window there on a high stool and watch Gamage’s being demolished. Then the Tea Centre in Lower Regent St is good too. ‘You get a nice class of person there.’
6 March. Gamage’s is having its final sale before being closed and demolished. A dreadful scene with empty counters and tumbled merchandise and people walking about like zombies. This is the year of change and decay, though presumably shoe-box buildings will spring up on the site of decay.
Being told that it is ‘virtually impossible’ for a novel like The Sweet Dove to be published now (by Constable). What is the future of my kind of writing? What can my notebooks contain except the normal kinds of bits and pieces that can never (?) now be worked into fiction. Perhaps in retirement, and even in the year before, a quieter, narrower kind of life can be worked out and adopted. Bounded by English literature and the Anglican Church and small pleasure like sewing and choosing dress material for this uncertain summer.
To Bob Smith in Lagos
I.A.I.
7 March 1972
Dear Bob,
At last we are moving the Institute to 210 High Holborn, then this building is to be demolished and so is Gamage’s – a whole period of civilisation gone! Perhaps the rot set in with the closing of the Kardomah all those months ago. The new offices are nice but far less spacious than old St Dunstan’s Chambers and we shall all be rather cramped. Hazel and I have a room rather like the one here but smaller. Of course the new place will be more convenient – nearer to the British Museum, SOAS, Bourne and Hollingsworth, Marks and Spencer and other desirable places.
Much love,
Barbara
20 March. The ABC café in Fleet St, opposite the Law Courts – new but ever old. The new name (The Light Bite), the smart orange and olive green and beige and stripped pine decor, the hanging lamp shades, the new green crockery – but inside the food is the same, the little woman cooking, the West Indian lady serving the tea, the nice, bright efficient lady at the cash desk. You might quote Cavafy’s poem about finding a new city, yet everything being the same, meaning oneself sitting there brooding.
Have thought of an idea for a novel based on our office move – all old, crabby characters, petty and obsessive, bad tempered – how easily one of them could have a false breast! But I’d better not write it till I have time to concentrate on it (look what happened to the last).
3 April. Easter. At Buckland on Good Friday I had a migraine, oh the shame of it. As one gets older, the difficulties of being a guest, helping and not helping, doing and not doing.
19 April. In the new offices, the move successfully accomplished.
Now I wander round Bloomsbury, scene of so many and distant past glories. Who can ever live here now?
The ageing white woman in the office. Beside the mysterious depths of the black girls she has nothing, no depths, no mystery, certainly no sexuality. She is all dried up by the mild British sun, in which she may sit in a deck chair, eyes closed against its ravages.
10 May. Sitting at lunch in the help-yourself in Bourne and Hollingsworth I think why, those women sitting round me are like lunatics in some colour supplement photographs of bad conditions in a mental home. Twitching or slumping or bending low over their food like an animal at a dish (especially if eating spaghetti).
To Philip Larkin
40 Brooksville Avenue
29 May 1972
Dear Philip,
What better time to reply to your letter than a cold windy cloudy Spring bank holiday, huddled in warm clothes, with a cup of coffee and a cat crouching on my desk? At least I shan’t be tempted to go and sit in the garden and sleep in a deckchair.
One begins to wonder what is going to happen to us all, though mercifully one doesn’t seriously worry yet. Kingsley Amis is 50, but I think you aren’t yet or not quite? I am 59 this week and next year shall be an OAP or a senior citizen – special terms for hairdos if you go between 9 and 10 a.m. on a Monday or Tuesday and no doubt other privileges. The kiddies and the old people.… I’m not sure that I like that.
Quite a lot of news since I last wrote! My sister and I have bought a cottage at Finstock (14 miles N.W. of Oxford) near Witney, Charlbury, Woodstock etc and hope to move into it later this summer, having sold this house. I shall still be working for another year anyway and shall try to find a room in London to live in during the week, as I wouldn’t have the strength to commute from Oxford every day, though many people make even longer journeys. What a pity one can’t still live in Bloomsbury for a pittance – that would suit me very well. I might advertise myself in the Church Times and now that I have definitely given up smoking I could say ‘non-smoker’, which would add to my desirability (gentlewoman, Anglican, quiet, ‘business lady’ etc) as a tenant. A pity one can’t offer oneself to the advertisers who ask for ‘4th girl share super Chelsea flat’.
We have also moved our offices from Fetter Lane to High Holborn – not a very great distance, but very different in most respects. A smaller more modern building and we are all more squashed together and have less privacy. But nearer to shops, the British Museum, and many Italian restaurants, second-hand bookshops, Marks and Spencer. I long to write a novel about the office move and the strange passions aroused and the unpleasantness about who was to go where – perhaps when I have the time I will. My novel about Leonora is now with Chatto and Windus who wrote a kind letter saying that they would be glad to consider it, but I haven’t very much hope. It’s amazing though how many publishers there still are that I haven’t tried, so I may go on with it. I have been too busy or too lazy or too discouraged to go on with my provincial university novel, though I much appreciated the local colour about the stink after the Sit-in!
Who will be the Poet-Laureate? It might well be you, but would you like it? Poor old Auden, coming to five in Oxford because he feels he might fall down or be taken ill and nobody would know, surely he isn’t that old? Betjeman might be the best choice? I liked your article on him in the Cornhill, but I think women (I at any rate) do enter into what he describes more fully than you perhaps realise, even the business girls in Camden Town and even perhaps ‘And now dear Lord I cannot wait, because I have a luncheon date!’
All good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
19 June. The position of the unmarried woman – unless, of course, she is somebody’s mistress, is of no interest whatsoever to the readers of modern fiction. The beginning of a novel?
22 June. Wilfred Whiteley’s memorial service. The death of a younger colleague – that could be part of my novel about old people. Belief and non-belief. A rather bleak sort of service in a way.
6 July. Living at Finstock and with no permanent base in London now. A strange life and in the heat of Monday feeling quite ill at Paddington and having to be ‘careful’, then at lunchtime throat constricted and unable to eat. Most disconcerting. But gradually better. Saturday morning in Charlbury – the dead (dying) baby bat in the gutter with its chocolate brown fur.
Keats walking in the fields of Kilburn is what I should like to know more about.
Lovely walk on Sunday evening to Wilcote, St Peter’s church with the little grassy graveyard and overlooking it the (apparently uninhabited but knowing Finstock probably not) back of a tall house, the windows overlooking the tombstones. It is left to me to find the dead bird, the dried up hedgehog body, the mangled rabbit.
2 October. Love between a middle-aged man and woman (i.e. Jane and Nicholas in Jane and Prudence) has softened into mild kindly looks and spectacles. Now consider how it might be in the unmarried middle-aged women in the office. Both have had affairs of some kind but now they can express love only through a tenderness and solicitude towards each other. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea,’ ‘Shouldn’t you go home.’ These feelings that should have been directed towards husband or child.
The man in the office would bring his own lunch of course.
An older woman would say, ‘Now what are your marriage arrangements?’
Could go back dispassionately naming earlier wives and mistresses.
What is a man’s and what is a woman’s work in an office?
Couldn’t there be lots of acrimonious salary discussions and going into budgets? How do they spend their money. Who brings what for lunch. Smoked salmon, 2oz. Their director has no notion of what things cost – send him into Sainsbury’s, an old man with a basket.
Someone has given John Middleton a folding umbrella – surely a woman – one could hardly envisage the exchange of such gifts between men.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
Finstock
32 Balcombe Street
London N.W.I.
24 October 1972
Dear Philip,
As you will see, I am now very well established in two places. I have been very lucky to find a nice little room in the house of friends of friends and I stay here Monday to Friday. Balcombe Street goes up from Dorset Square and is between Baker Street and Marylebone stations. Indeed as I lie in bed in the early morning I can sometimes hear the station announcer from Marylebone booming away about something. I have been here since August and now feel very much at home. I have ‘use of kitchen’ and make my own breakfast and evening meal (‘dinner’ is perhaps not quite the word for it). Then on Friday evening I go to Finstock (good train from Paddington) where I have a different sort of life. Rather strange and disorientating in a way but I feel I am getting the best of both worlds. Recently we had a monk staying – a cousin of my hostess.
We like Finstock very much and the people have been very friendly. It is not a beautiful village but so near all those lovely places like Minster Lovell, Burford, Swinbrook (grave of Unity Mitford in the churchyard), Westwell etc etc. Our house (cottage) is in the olde bit and was originally a 17th century barn, converted about six years ago. We have beams in every room, but modern comforts too. We have two bedrooms and a tiny spare room – sitting room and kitchen open plan – bathroom downstairs. A double garage! Excellent for storing all those odds and ends we still haven’t been able to fit in. We had to dispose of quite a lot of furniture as our house in London was bigger. But this is much better – less work as one gets older! The cats love it and after a rather traumatic (for us) first night or two have settled down very well. Tom’s idea of a ‘happening’ to amuse a party of ladies was to enter suddenly through the window with a not quite dead mouse in his mouth.
The church is not very high (‘Series 2’) but there is quite an enthusiastic congregation of people who have come fairly recently to the neighbourhood. Hilary and I are a bit jaded and cynical about things like bazaars but try not to show it. Like most country parishes the Vicar has 3 churches to cope with (not like the old palmy days of which I write in Some Tame Gazelle when every village had its own vicar or rector).
I haven’t been doing any writing – my divided life hardly allows it – though I tinker with my provincial university novel sometimes. Next year when I’m due to retire I shall have more time. And I can’t think whose biography to write as friends urge me to! There is another novelist in Finstock – Gilbert Phelps who wrote The Winter People (about South America). He is very nice.
I wonder how Betjeman will do as Poet Laureate, what he will write. If you had been P.L. what would you have written – much less predictable. I expect you are glad not to be? I enjoyed your 50th birthday tribute though nobody chose all my favourite Larkin poems – Roy Fuller chose one, I think.
Great staff dramas in our office – that set up suggests itself as fruitful novel material, but no time to go into that now.
Very best regards,
Barbara
31 October. How unsuitable to be reading Harold Acton’s Memoirs of an Aesthete at lunch in Lyons (Jolyon) after a rather dire little service at St Alban’s Holborn. Series 4 I should think. Oh pray for the Church of England!
5 November. Walking in Oxford on a Sunday afternoon – to look at the changed St Hilda’s from the outside, though the gardens look the same. Then to Addison’s Walk and deer and beech trees shedding their leaves. A good place to lie down waiting for death covered in leaves by the still streams.
8 December. The woman with the dogs very much in Baker St station these days. This morning the almost unbearable pathos of seeing the two of them curled up together asleep in a carrier bag.
A lonely person found dead with no food in the house (but what else would be there?). A cultured woman who has worked in an office, who realises that she is in danger but is too late to stop herself.
January 1973.
There could be talk in the office about elderly people being found dead with no food in the house.
‘One might have a tin of soup but lack the strength to open it, or even to tear away the cellophane from a packet of biscuits.’
21 February. My novel has its umpteenth rejection (from Cassell). After lunch with Dirom at Oodles we go to Red Lion Square and I enter the portals of Cassell’s to collect the nicely done-up MS. Where next? Up to Faber in Queen’s Square?
27 February. Sometime in the early 1960s they had cleared away the undergrowth in the park and everyone said how much better it was. People couldn’t throw things there or molest children (kiddies). But now the bushes were beginning to grow again and in places gave enough shelter for our heroine to conceal herself when the man came round at dusk blowing his whistle to get everyone out before shutting the park. I have fallen through the net of the Welfare State, she thought, picturing this more as a coarse serviceable hair net than a net to catch trapeze artists.
To Philip Larkin
32 Balcombe Street
13 March 1973
Dear Philip,
Now that Christmas is over, and winter almost, and spring really here (in the country) I begin to look forward to my retirement though it won’t happen all at once when I reach ‘the age’ in June. I’ve already had papers to fill up and it’s rather a comfort to think that somebody is prepared to pay me money for not working. Ironical to think that I used to look forward to retirement as the time when I would really be able to get down to writing! No doubt I shall try something and perhaps when I have more time I shall do it better – but to what end, if not publication?
We are in a confused and disturbed state at the place where I work – Professor Forde (now nearly 71) wishing to retire (or his wife wishing him to) but nobody suitable to take over – and what is the future anyway for Institutions like ours, founded in the twenties to help Africans to get school-books in their own languages? It is a rich subject for fiction if one can look at it with a novelist’s cruelly dispassionate eye, as I fear I sometimes can. Added to all of which – should we register for VAT?! I was incensed to receive a communication from Cape asking if I proposed to register – the very small income I make from my books is much smaller because of their refusal to publish me any more!
Yesterday I was walking past a bookshop in Long Acre when I saw your face looking out from the cover of All What Jazz. Next to it were placed some Victorian photographs in those little folding cases of the period. There seemed no reason for the curious juxtaposition. It is a secondhand shop and everything is very expensive.
I suppose your Oxford Book is due out soon and I hope will be well received, though I suppose anthologies will always annoy as many as they please. I like Helen Gardner’s very much but it is too big – in actual bulk – to read very comfortably.
With the best of wishes (and for the Oxford B.)
Barbara
To Bob Smith in Aberdeen
32 Balcombe Street
13 April 1973
Dearest Bob,
I am really writing this at the I. A.I. where I am smothered in a mass of intractable French and English seminar papers which we are trying to make into a publishable volume. How nice it would be if the publication of such papers were to be forbidden by law!
No good news of writing, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve given up sending round the last one – 21 publishers is surely enough. Now I just jot things down in my notebooks, lacking the courage to start anything again though I suppose I will one day. Both Jock and I are longing for the sort of book which J. Guest in Longmans described as ‘not the sort to which people are turning’. I’ve just read The Golden Bowl and the last 2 vols of Leon Edel’s Henry James biography which I enjoyed very much. I got a bit muddled about Rye, though, thinking that it ought to be E. F. Benson dictating to the secretary when of course he came after H.J. He (H.J.) was worried in 1909 at the number of motor cars which seemed to be turning up in Rye. Happy, innocent days.
Have you any news of Richard? See how lightly I can write that now, as befits a woman on the threshold of sixty.
Much love,
Barbara
2 July. In the train. I can’t have a Pepsi, she thought. A woman of my age and appearance would be expected to order coffee. Yet she longed for the dark icy liquid and the prickle of its bubbles.
Things you can do in London: Austerity meal (with wine) at St Alban’s Holborn.
In order to cheat death or just to keep oblivion at bay their names had been given to Halls, lectures, memorial funds, prizes etc.
To Philip Larkin
32 Balcombe Street
11 July 1973
Dear Philip,
I hope the dust raised by the Oxford Book has now settled on the dark suit of the librarian – or perhaps he may be on holiday, having exchanged the dark suit for a T shirt – with an inscription like BIRD LIVES on the chest? It must be about this time that you take your car on holiday somewhere?
I am still at work, though I have just passed my 60th birthday, but various things have happened which make it difficult for me to retire immediately. To begin with our Director, Daryll Forde, suddenly died at the beginning of May – at work one day and dead that same evening. It was all very distressing and we have been rather like a rudderless ship, though things are beginning to settle down a bit now. We haven’t really found a new Director yet but have two ‘Acting Co-Directors’. I wonder how that will work out! There was a Memorial Service (‘Thanksgiving Service’ seems to be the term now) at the London University Church in Gordon Square. DF was nor a believer so it wasn’t very Christian though the Chaplain gave a kind of blessing at the end. It consisted of readings and music with an address by a colleague. Afterwards some of us were invited to have a drink in what was described as an ‘anteroom’ but really it was a kind of vestry with crucifixes and hymnbooks lying around and, on a hanger, a very beautiful white cassock or soutane, such as Roman priests in the tropics wear – that rather puzzled me. It was like something that I might have put into a novel, I fear. Anyway I am going on working for a bit but have told ‘them’ that I may feel like working at home in the country sometimes which I did rather successfully during June when my friends at Balcombe Street were away. I do rather agree with you about some of the difficulties of having no work, and when could one start drinking. Not before 12? Perhaps not gin and anything until 12? After all one doesn’t want to develop what the Americans call ‘a drinking problem’ which I gather quite a few female American anthropologists have. One might do quite a good study on that – it might well be linked with other ‘problems’ (into which we need not go!).
The only good writing news I have is that Chivers of Bath have agreed to do A G of B and No Fond Return in their new Portway Reprint Series for Libraries. So that means that all my books have been done in this way and people can read them. I’ve really given up sending anything round at the moment, but still find myself trying to write. But about old people!
I hope you are well and that this year is being a good one for you. London gets even more dire though one still has some affection for it. All shops are now Travel or Photocopying or Employment Agencies, with the occasional Sandwich Bar. (I mean the small shops round here, when they fall vacant).
Very best wishes!
Barbara
6 August. Beautiful Tudor-style Old People’s Home for sale. Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) perhaps rather a tiresome person. Just imagine her with Truman Capote!
2 November. All Souls. If only, Letty thought, Christianity could have had a British, even an English origin! Palestine was so remote, violence on one’s TV screen.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
16 October 1973
Dear Philip,
I hope all goes well with you. I still haven’t quite retired, and love being in the country. Life is very full and the village is in many ways like Some Tame Gazelle or even T.F. Powys! ‘Miss Hurt and the Paraclete’ might be one chapter. (Our vicar does sometimes preach a little above the heads of his congregation).
I have written a letter to The Author, sparked off by Trevor Hoyle’s account of publishing his own novel, about the difficulties even published novelists have now, so I hope it will be printed – rather more to the point, as far as I’m concerned, than this endless wrangling over Public Lending Rights, etc.
I am writing, quietly in bed in the early morning, a novel about four people in their sixties working in the same office. I don’t know if I shall finish it or if I do whether it will be any good to try a publisher.
Excuse this egotistical letter – why does one get like this? Sad that Auden and William Plomer have gone
Very best wishes,
Barbara
28 November. They have pulled down Gamage’s and so much in Fetter Lane including St Dunstan’s Chambers where we worked for close on 20 years. The emotion that place saw will never be experienced in 210 High Holborn [new offices of the I.A.I.]. Now flat – nothing but rubble and a deep wide hole in the ground. Walked back through Lincoln’s Inn Fields – so different from the summer – a bitter day, coldest for November since the beginning of the century.
12 January 1974. In Charlbury churchyard the older graves have sunk right into the turf – worn cherubs’ heads just visible above the grass.
27 March. Balcombe St. Dark, dull and rather cold. Woke early. ‘The Trout’ on Radio 3 and reading The Clever Woman of the Family [by Charlotte M. Yonge] in bed. At Holborn station a notice on the blackboard explains a delay ‘due to a person under the train’ at Hammersmith.
Small strope [stroke]. [This stroke caused a kind of partial dyslexia for a while, hence the spelling of this entry] Investigation revealsed breask canser and exces of calcium thought to be from canser but bone trace did not conferm them. Dr Burke examineed me (+ studenns) and suscepts excess of parathroughoid [parathyroid] gland in the neck. More test may reveil that a small operation on the neck may be necessary, so tomorrow bariom meal, urine tests etc. On Tuesday examination by Mr Bron eye specialist to see if any calcium there. But hopefully home cerca Wednesday. Asphasia: stroke?
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
3 June 1974
Dear Philip,
It was a marvellous surprise to get High Windows last week, especially as I didn’t realise you had another book coming out. (I wish I could be more worthy of the very kind inscription you put in the book!) I am finding so much richness in it – I’m not sure that I agree with the S. Times reviewer’s choice of favourite poems, or ‘best’ poems – ‘Cut Grass’, in this lovely early summer is immediately wonderful, but so is ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’ – and what about ‘The Old Fools’ – horribly near the bone. The last rather appropriate as I have been ill for the last two months and am only now recovering. I have to be into hospital again tomorrow to have my parathyroid gland (or one of them!) removed. It was found that I had too much calcium in my blood – the doctors were certain that the cause of this was my cancer of 3 years ago but when I had a ‘bone trace’ it was found that there was nothing in my bones to confirm this diagnosis so they had to think again. I was an object of interest and had many doctors round me which was gratifying, of course. Apparently I have high blood pressure (which I never suspected) and have to take various pills of different colours. A subject for a poem might be ‘pills’?
I must apologise for all this, but it is no more than the truth and it seems to have changed my life in a sense, bringing my retirement nearer, though I had intended to retire in October anyway. So I am no longer going to London every Monday morning but have had a long convalescence and much enjoyed being in the country. I was in the Radcliffe the whole of April, except for a few days at home for Easter. I didn’t mind being in hospital and even found it quite interesting when I began to feel better. The food was quite good and I got to know a lot of people in the ward. The problem of being old is with one on such occasions, though. When I thought my days were numbered I did feel it was perhaps better to die in one’s sixties. I feel that if I were disabled or incapacitated I wouldn’t be able to bear it – wouldn’t be ‘splendid’, as women are expected to be – men too, no doubt.
I haven’t done any writing lately but think I will try again soon – at least to put words down on paper. Perhaps the only hope of getting published is a romantic or gothic novel?
Must stop now – I hope this letter hasn’t too many mistakes in it. When I was first ill I had difficulty in reading and writing but this is now improving. Imagine the irony of that!
Once again very many thanks for the book. I shall take it into hospital. The Churchill this time, where they say you get bacon for breakfast!
All good wishes,
Yours,
Barbara
4 June. In the Churchill Hospital. The mixed ward. The pathos of men in pyjamas and dressing gowns. Philip Larkin type subjects. The complex of buildings like mission huts. In the morning birds picking about in the grass.
23 June. T.S. Eliot baptised on 29th June 1927 at Finstock. The Bishop of Oxford came and dedicated the T.S. Eliot memorial. Then followed a week of gloom and rain. I tried to write and make An Unsuitable Attachment into a romantic novel but I doubt if it’s possible. On Friday I had been to the doctor who told me that I must retire and gave me a certificate for another four weeks.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
19 July 1974
Dear Philip,
Yesterday my sister drove me to London and we collected my ‘things’ from 32 Balcombe Street, including my winter clothes and the manuscript of a novel I’ve started to write about older people working in an office. It’s rather discouraging to go on writing with so little hope of publication but I try not to think about that. By the way, the letter I wrote to The Author about not getting published was never published, which seems to be the final accolade of failure.
Since I last wrote I’ve read more deeply in your new book and have learnt ‘Jake Balokowsky’almost by heart – how well I remember that kind of (Assistant) Professor from my days of dealing with American anthropologists. ‘The Building’ is most moving and disturbing – it’s a pity that so many of the people it could apply to will never read it, all the people sitting there.
I suppose you will be starting your holiday or ‘leave’ about now, though I suppose Librarians don’t necessarily have to take August like school holidays. For the moment I find it enough to be in the country and able to visit stately homes and gardens open to the public in the summer afternoons. It is pretty good too to be able to read a novel in the morning though my conscience doesn’t allow me to do that very often. Yet I can listen to the radio quite happily. I am doing some gardening and our garden is really rather pretty – mostly designed by my sister. She is now working part time in Oxford – I can’t remember if I told you – cataloguing modern Greek books at the Taylorian [Institute]. So now our roles are reversed and she goes out and I stay at home.
I wonder what your neighbours are like in your new house. I hope not too much noise from kiddies or washing on a Sunday morning. Even the nicest young people err in this respect! Or perhaps you have elderly people next door to you. I’m sure anyway that your car will sit primly in its own little garage rather than outside on the pavement. This sounds as if I am mocking you but of course I don’t mean to.
The sun is coming out again and I will turn to my novel. They say Graham Greene writes only 250 words a day, so I should be able to manage that!
With all good wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
31 August. Our turn to do the flowers and brasses. If you forget and haven’t quite enough flowers will it do to put some object (? a stuffed animal) on the pedestal usually adorned with a particularly splendid flower arrangement.
11 September. A full country day. Started off with a visit to Dr. My blood pressure is better (‘super’). Retirement: I think – I am eating soup and jacket potato and drinking coffee in Oxford on a Monday. Letty would be doing this in a different place, probably in London among shopping women.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
1 December 1974
Dear Philip,
I hope you are really well settled in your new house so that you can hardly remember living anywhere else, though perhaps that doesn’t happen with houses, only places. Although I have been to London twice since my illness it now seems completely alien, and of course one is rather glad not to be there, all things considered.
I had a checkup at the Radcliffe in October and the consultant was pleased with me. I go to my own doctor regularly – he is young and very conscientious. When I told him I was going to London for my retirement party he advised me not to get too emotionally excited. Luckily I didn’t! The office gave me a nice lunch time party with wines and food and I was allowed to ask my favourite anthropologists and others. There weren’t too many speeches and I was presented with a cheque and the promise of my ‘present’ the New Oxford Dictionary which (very suitably!) happened to be out of print or re-binding.
I find that I enjoy my retirement very much – I suppose having been ill means that it didn’t happen in the way retirement usually does so the break didn’t seem so violent. When I got back to the office I found such a lot of different things happening (there is a new young Director in place of Professor Forde) that I was rather glad to be out of it all! I am still doing a little mild work e. g. the African tribal index for the journal and the odd bibliography which I find quite a good discipline, so that I work for an hour or two in the morning. Did I tell you that I have agreed to act as one of the preliminary judges in the 1974 awards for the Romantic Novelists Association?! I have so far read about 10 novels. They are extremely varied in type – some historical, others more purely ‘romantic’ in a modern setting. The one thing they lack is humour or irony – and of course one does miss that. But in a way they do seem to reflect some aspects of life that may be valid for the fortunate ones! As much as Doris Lessing or Edna O’Brien, or even B. Pym.
Very best wishes,
Yours ever,
Barbara
25 December. A full Christmas Day in mild windy weather. Ginger wine with the Dores after church (duck in the oven), sherry with Vicki and Bob Redston (duck looked at and turned), punch with the Phelps (duck finally eaten).
2 February 1975. A day in Oxford 40 years on. Beginning in Duke Humfrey then a visit to the Ladies Cloakroom in the basement of the Radcliffe Camera (where smoking is forbidden), then in the local history department of the Central Library and after that lunch at Selfridge’s (beefburger, baked beans and chips). A wander round the various departments and then a visit to C & A and on a bus to the Radcliffe Infirmary where we get off and walk back to Little Clarendon St to Laura Ashley where I buy a bundle of patchwork pieces. Then a walk in the churchyard in Banbury Road, all almond and prunus in this early sun. Passing the Institute of Social Anthropology I saw they had blue curtains at the window and someone was cutting the grass.
To Philip Larkin
Barn Cottage
23 March 1975
Dear Philip,
For once it’s a fine Sunday morning and the meat is in the oven so I have ‘time’ for a letter. It’s funny how one harks back to one’s childhood and schooldays, when Sunday was the letter-writing time. Today is Palm Sunday and we have a service in the evening with ‘Prose, poetry and music’. I haven’t helped to choose any of the readings on this occasion or I might have been tempted to put in the Arthur Symons Naples Palm Sunday poem which would hardly be suitable. My sister has just suggested that as so few people now go to church Palms might be distributed at garages on the appropriate Sunday morning.
I hope you are feeling more like writing and perhaps generally in better spirits with the coming of spring. I do feel like writing sometimes and am very gradually trying a novel, doing a bit every morning when I can. I have also been doing a little work for my old Institute, but I do find that I am not reading all those heavy works that people always say they will read in their retirement.
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 you, 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.