Abstract
Certain themes and patterns that Barbara Pym would persistently explore are manifest in her youth, in her years as a student at Oxford, and in those closely following. Her earliest creative forays set out her initial interest in social roles, and entanglements with men she met at Oxford had a marked effect on her fictional portrayal of male characters. More importantly, Pym’s own analysis of her reactions to emotional change during these youthful years reveals a fear of discontinuity, which she experienced as loss. Pym’s pre-war interest in change was personal, focused on the circumstances of her life, particularly her relations with men, and on the roles that she established for herself, some of them unsatisfying and restrictive. Writing was already a fundamental element of her life, and she was also a prodigious reader of novels and poetry, keeping a commonplace book in which the entries, excerpts from her reading, establish a model that she would maintain throughout her life. Moreover, these entries demonstrate that Pym situated her own experiences in the ongoing context of the English literary tradition.
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- 1.
Holt (1990: 279). Henry Hoccleve is a primary character in Some Tame Gazelle, Pym’s first published novel.
- 2.
Pym refers to journals from her mid-teens, but these are not extant. See MS Pym 101, 84r. Citations that appear in this form (MS Pym) refer to the manuscript number (shelf mark) assigned by the Bodleian Library, followed by the assigned page number(s). The “r” designation attached to a page number is an abbreviation for “recto,” the right side of a page, and “v” refers to “verso,” the reverse side of a page. For archived material consisting of single sheets of paper (letters, for example), the abbreviation “fol.” (“folio”) will be used, followed by page numbers.
- 3.
No Fond Return of Love was published in 1961; her next novel to be published was Quartet in Autumn, in 1977, a 16-year gap. The rejection of An Unsuitable Attachment in 1963 began Pym’s 14 years during which she was unable to publish her work.
- 4.
For a much more detailed version of Pym’s early years, see Hazel Holt’s biography, A Lot to Ask, the source of the compressed account found here (Holt 1990). “The Early Life,” a chapter written by Hilary Pym (Walton ) for A Very Private Eye, includes similar information as well as some family history (Holt and Pym 1984: 1–5).
- 5.
The phrase, a favorite of Pym, comes from the first line of a poem by John Keble, “The trivial round, the common task.”
- 6.
Pym began drafting what she called her “novel of real people” in July 1934, projecting herself, her sister, and her Oxford friends into the future (Holt and Pym 1984: 44, 45). On the title page of an early typescript, Pym explains in an “Author’s Note”: “The action of this story takes place in some vague period of the future, about thirty years from now” (MS Pym 2/2). At the time she was in her early twenties.
- 7.
In Less Than Angels (1955), Pym has Deirdre Swan recall similarly, “Ah, my childhood, my innocent childhood … remembering a Tchekov play which she had recently seen” (LTA 38, Pym 1980).
- 8.
Wyatt-Brown probes this libretto for its psychological revelations (Wyatt-Brown 1992: 11–12).
- 9.
The manuscript (MS Pym 1) is dated August 1929–April 1930.
- 10.
The page numbers cited in reference to MS Pym 1 and MS Pym 97 are those assigned by Pym herself. The Bodleian assigned no page numbers, which accounts for the absence of recto or verso indications in my citations.
- 11.
In a 1978 interview for the BBC radio show Desert Island Discs (Pym 1978), Pym speaks of the novel’s inspirational effect on her, and says as well that she went to Oxford to read English with “the idea that I would be a writer.” “Ambition to be a writer” then led her to return home after completing her studies to try to write. In the same interview, she says that, upon her release from wartime service, a period during which she did not write any fiction, she thought “that I had more or less given it up,” but found that “writing gets hold of you in a curious way, and I couldn’t really leave it alone.” The interview is archived on the BBC Radio 4 website.
- 12.
Both Wyatt-Brown and Cotsell attend to the importance of Huxley for aspects of Pym’s artistic development. Wyatt-Brown looks at the early signs of emotional distancing, here achieved by Pym’s use of a male perspective (Wyatt-Brown 1992: 19–23); Cotsell looks at the early signs of Pym’s ongoing ambiguous relation to modernism (Cotsell 1989: 11–13).
- 13.
In May 1934, Pym began making entries in her commonplace book, which she titled “My Love in Literature” (MS Pym 83). Most quotations were entered in the 1930s and 1940s, with a section devoted to the war years; the final entry is dated August 1971.
- 14.
Wyatt-Brown discusses the psychological need fulfilled by Pym’s creation of the Sandra persona and the inevitable and invariably upsetting results (Wyatt-Brown 1992: 25–27).
- 15.
For a brief discussion of the number of men referred to in MS Pym 101, see Yvonne Cocking, “Rupert Gleadow: Barbara’s First Oxford Romance” (Cocking 2013c: 25–52).
- 16.
Primrose Salt was Debutante of the Year in 1933. Felix Felton and Peter Glenville, whom Pym praises in their roles of Faustus and Mephistophilis, went on to act professionally.
- 17.
Rossen devotes a chapter, “Love in the Great Libraries,” to the relation between Pym’s intellectual and emotional pursuits at Oxford, and its influence on her fictional portrayal of educated women (Rossen 1987: 21–40).
- 18.
A Balzac specialist, Herbert J. Hunt was a fellow and tutor at St. Edmund Hall.
- 19.
Eleanor Rooke took the position of English Tutor at St. Hilda’s in 1920. Pym’s contemporaries at the College describe her as cultivating a reputation as an eccentric “rather after the style of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland,” and as doting on her pet dog, James. She was also a writer of light verse (Rayner 1993: 63, 64). Christina Keith, the Classics tutor, came to St. Hilda’s in 1919 after working in a program, located in France, to educate British soldiers during World War I. She had managed to take a short tour of the war-torn landscape, and recorded her experience, published posthumously as War Classics: The remarkable memoir of Scottish scholar Christina Keith on the Western Front (2014). Born in Thurso, Scotland, and educated at Edinburgh University, she returned home, after leaving St. Hilda’s, to write a study of Robert Burns, The Russet Coat (1956), and of Walter Scott, The Author of Waverly (1964). Dorothy Whitelock arrived at St. Hilda’s in 1930, a year before Pym, as a lecturer in English language, and went on to become a leading scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and culture. Subjects taught at St. Hilda’s included Old English, Old Norse, and philology (Schulman 2005: 553–563). For more details about life at St. Hilda’s during Pym’s time, some gathered from students’ reminiscences, see Rayner (1993: 57–74).
- 20.
Somerville Hall and Lady Margaret Hall first admitted students in 1879; St. Hugh’s Hall followed in 1886. St. Hilda’s Hall was founded in 1893. All had attained the level of College by the time of Pym’s entry into Oxford.
- 21.
See the memorial service address for Seaton in St. Hugh’s College Chronicle 1974–75: 29–31.
- 22.
See the obituary for Everett in St. Hugh’s College Chronicle 1953–54: 24. Helen Gardner credits Everett for her decision (Gardner 1982: 147)
- 23.
“Had a very nice letter from Miss Whitelock” (MS Pym 107, November 17, 1941). To cite material gathered from Pym’s pocket diaries (small datebooks measuring 3 × 2 inches in size, each devoted to a single year, with pre-printed days of the week and dates), I will give dates of the entries rather than the page numbers assigned by the Bodleian. For the holdings of Pym’s library, see MS Pym 175, the catalog compiled by Hilary Pym Walton.
- 24.
Charles Wrenn, an Anglo-Saxonist, was one of the Inklings (an informal literary discussion group associated with Oxford, whose best-known members include C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien) and succeeded to the chair held by Tolkien.
- 25.
Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld, lexicographer and philologist, was Merton Professor and Fellow of Merton College. Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1932) was only one of his scholarly contributions to the field. At its publication, he was awarded the British Academy Biennial Prize (1932).
- 26.
When Pym knew him, John Leslie Noble O’Loughlin had recently taken his Oxford degree in English and was working on the supplemental volume to the Oxford English Dictionary (1933), under the supervision of Charles Onions, whose lectures she also attended.
- 27.
A convert to Catholicism in 1917, Knox was a Roman Catholic chaplain at Oxford during Pym’s time there. Change associated with religion fascinated Pym. In the wake of Harvey’s marriage, during the days of her affair with Julian Amery, she read For Sinners Only, about the Oxford Group, “which brought a curious kind of consolation as well as making me laugh. I thought how nice and easy it would be to be changed” (MS Pym 103, 69v).
- 28.
Henry Harvey, whom Pym supposed her intellectual superior, also graduated with a second class degree, and then went on to write a Bachelor of Letters thesis on Gerard Langbaine the younger (a late seventeenth-century critic of the English theater).
- 29.
John Wilmot, 2rd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), a favorite at the Restoration court of Charles II, wrote lyric and satiric poetry in the Cavalier vein, much of it notorious for its sexually explicit quality. His works were held in a restricted section of the Bodleian, where material considered obscene was sequestered. Books so classified were marked by the Greek letter phi. Perhaps with the help of Liddell, Pym had access to them. When, in December 1934, Liddell sent her a gift of Rochester’s Poems on Several Occasions: with Valentinian; A Tragedy (1696), she writes in her journal, “I was delighted with it, in spite of its expurgations! But as I’ve read the real thing from Phi while I was at Oxford it didn’t matter much” (Holt and Pym 1984: 46–47). She retained this volume in her library (MS Pym 175, fol. 470e).
- 30.
Pym compiled a list of editions of Rochester’s works, along with a short list of books about him, including George Etheredge’s Restoration comedy The Man of Mode, the lead character of which is sometimes said to be modeled on Rochester (MS Pym 83, 10v–11v). Pym’s interest in Rochester continued throughout her life. At her death her library included the biography Lord Rochester’s Monkey (1974) by Graham Greene (MS Pym 175, fol. 280), and her final publication, “A Year in West Oxfordshire” (Pym 1981b), which appeared posthumously, contains references to his birthplace. Pym was solicited to write this piece by editor Ronald Blythe.
- 31.
For a close analysis of the relationship between Gleadow and Pym, see “Rupert Gleadow: Barbara’s First Oxford Romance” (Cocking 2013c: 25–52). Cocking’s discussion derives from extant letters from Gleadow in MS Pym 149 and 150, and Pym’s diaries, 1932–1943. Wyatt-Brown rather inaccurately classifies Pym’s relationship with Gleadow as among her other “emotional disasters” and says that their friendship “marked the end of whatever optimism she had about her relationships with men” (Wyatt-Brown 1992: 28–29).
- 32.
This miscellaneous collection, edited by Francis Meynell, which includes poetry, recipes, and suggestions for activities and games, was in Pym’s library at her death (MS Pym 175).
- 33.
Gleadow is quoting from a popular song, “I’ll See You Again,” written by Noël Coward, sung in the film Bitter Sweet (1933). Later Pym also quotes this lyric at the end of a diary entry that describes her first time in Germany with Friedbert Gluck (MS Pym 102, 66v).
- 34.
Gleadow turned his hand to writing novels and short stories after leaving Oxford but was unhappy with the results (MS Pym 150, 96v–97r).
- 35.
Coincidentally, “Gabriel” would be one of her nicknames for Harvey. Holt thinks that Gleadow’s letter refers specifically to Harvey (Holt 1990: 35). But the timing of this letter (October), and Pym’s first references to Harvey (as “the pale Magdalen man”) in the following January, suggest otherwise. In Pym’s account of her first evening with Harvey, she writes, “Gabriel Harvey he told me his name was, so that was what I called him afterwards” (MS Pym 101, 68r).
- 36.
The book was in her library at her death (MS Pym 175, fol. 274).
- 37.
Harker proposed marriage, as did Brian Mitchell, the brother of an Oxford friend (Holt 1990: 27, 59).
- 38.
Harvey was at Christ Church rather than Magdalen; C. S. Lewis, at Magdalen, was his tutor, which led to Pym’s misapprehension (Holt 1990: 36). Lorenzo is the addressee in Night-Thoughts (1742–1745) by Edward Young. Pym copied lines from the poem into her commonplace book “My Life in Literature.” The selection (taken from Night II) begins, “O ye Lorenzos of our age!” and lines from it appear in Some Tame Gazelle as the conclusion to the Archdeacon’s Judgment Day Sermon (MS Pym 83, 2r). In 1934, while at Oxford, she bought the two-volume Poetical Works of Edward Young, and also owned The Complaint: or Night-Thoughts (MS Pym 102, 34v; MS Pym 175, fol. 597).
- 39.
Harvey came to reside in Willersey, Oxfordshire, a village proximate to Finstock, where Pym moved upon her retirement, and they took car trips together, visiting historical spots in England. Pym took a number of summer trips to visit Liddell in Athens.
- 40.
Wyatt-Brown speculates that Pym’s relationship with Harvey “might have originated from some unresolved oedipal conflicts in early childhood,” conflicts of which Pym was unaware and had no interest in examining. Nevertheless, she asserts, Pym “learned to convert her suffering into a new kind of comic novel that would celebrate the experience of deprivation and self-restraint” (Wyatt-Brown 1992: 30–35).
- 41.
As later entries make clear, her description leaves out sexual elements of the evening. While unhappy over the summer, owing to “the length of the vac. And repressions of the obvious kind,” she wishes, “Oh for Gabriel Harvey to press kisses on my not unwilling mouth as he did on that not yet forgotten evening of May 10th!” (MS Pym 101, 89r). A few days later she writes of the same evening and “Gabriel’s cave man squeeze—the sudden narrowing of his eyes as he grew passionate” (MS Pym 101, 89v).
- 42.
The word “masochism” derives from name Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs.
- 43.
“But thus, thus, keeping endlesse Holy-day.” See discussion that follows.
- 44.
Journal entries from the early months of 1934, which, given the remaining context seem to describe some of her unhappy encounters with Harvey, have been partly cut away. For example, MS Pym 102, 42r–42v, 48r–48v are partial pages. These missing pieces are presumably the ones Pym refers to in a 1940 datebook entry: “expurgating my 1933–4 diary” (MS Pym 106, January 2). This record also reveals that she was rereading a journal from six years earlier.
- 45.
I am quoting the translation from Texts & Pretexts. An Anthology with Commentaries by Aldous Huxley, where Pym saw Petronius’s Latin and Jonson’s English versions printed together (Huxley 1933: 116).
- 46.
The line “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” appears in An Essay on Man.
- 47.
“Desolate and sick of an old passion” is from the poem “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae” by Ernest Dowson (1894). Over a year earlier, in October 1933, Pym had obtained Dowson’s poems from the Bodleian and “spent some time in finding appropriate lines and poems. I am beginning to enjoy my pose of romantically unrequited love” (Holt and Pym 1984: 27). She alludes to this poem again in Jane and Prudence, as well as another by Dowson, “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam” (specifically the lines “I have …/ Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng” and “They are not long, the days of wine and roses” [JP 159, 7]). She also half-quotes a Dowson line in Some Tame Gazelle (“I cried for madder music and for stronger wine” from “Non Sum Qualis” [STG 187, Pym 1983]).
- 48.
“On the Memory of Mr. Edward King, Drown’d in the Irish Seas”
- 49.
“That passed, so may this.”
- 50.
Titled Civil to Strangers, “Adam and Cassandra” was published, along with Gervase and Flora, in the volume, Civil to Strangers and Other Writings, edited by Hazel Holt (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987). See Cotsell (1989), Chapter 2, for a rare discussion of Civil to Strangers, Gervase and Flora (both unpublished at the time of his writing), and “The Lumber Room” (never published) primarily in the light of her failed relationship with Harvey and the deleterious effect of unresolved emotion on her fiction.
- 51.
In my discussion of Gervase and Flora, I cite the manuscript version when Holt’s edited version differs from the manuscript. Otherwise, the citations in parentheses give the abbreviation GF, in reference to the version published in the volume Civil to Strangers and Other Writings (Pym 1988b).
- 52.
Holt’s edited and simplified version (Holt 1988) omits Pym’s handwritten conclusion.
- 53.
Pym is quoting from “The Spleen,” by the eighteenth-century poet Matthew Green.
- 54.
Liddell says that at Oxford Pym “adopted ‘Cassandra’ for her own [name],” and that is the name he uses in the mock-heroic poems that he addressed to her (Liddell 1989: 12).
- 55.
Notes Pym made in preparation for writing Excellent Women do show her strong identification with the narrator. In sketching out various episodes, she refers to Mildred Lathbury as “I” (see “Mildred’s World: the Making of Excellent Women” [Cocking 2013b: 92–94]).
- 56.
Presumably Pym is borrowing the term “flat character” from E. M. Forster’s discussion in Aspects of the Novel (1927). With reference to this letter, Cotsell looks at the vexed relation between Harvey and Pym as continuing her “literary debate” with modernism, “which represents of false, clever masculine influence which she seeks to repudiate” (Cotsell 1989: 17–19).
- 57.
A favorite poet of Pym and one who would, in his turn, be a fan of hers, giving Excellent Women a favorable review.
- 58.
In journal entries written in mid-March 1938, Pym describes in detail each meeting with Amery that winter/spring, from the first on December 3 to the last on March 11. After describing each meeting she notes the amount of time they spent together (MS Pym 103, 66v–72v). As was usual for Pym, these days were spent in a social whirlwind. Her datebook for 1938 (MS Pym 104) notes these meetings with Amery briefly, as well as her other many and varied activities—sherry parties, time spent with Robert Liddell and John Barnicot, and meals at St. Hilda’s, where she saw her former tutors, Eleanor Rooke and Dorothy Whitelock (see the entries for in MS Pym 104 for February 25–March 11).
- 59.
MS Pym 6/1-3.
- 60.
- 61.
The periodic entries to this “sentimental journal” (MS Pym 146) date from May 1936 to October 28, 1951. Pym describes the distinction between her pocket diary datebooks and her “sentimental journal”: I keep a bald record of everyday happenings in a neat little book which has a set space for every day. And I write in this book [the “sentimental journal”] only when the occasion seems to demand it” (MS Pym 146, 21r). Many of the entries in her datebooks are not as “bald” as she implies here.
- 62.
The friend was Denis Pullein-Thompson, a member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, who went on to have a career as a playwright and actor under the name Denis Cannan.
- 63.
Looking back, in March 1940 she wrote “Oh how absurd and delicious it is to be in love with somebody younger than yourself! Everybody should try it—no life can be complete without it” (Holt and Pym 1984: 101).
- 64.
MS Pym 103, 66v–72v.
- 65.
For her appearance on the radio show Desert Island Discs (recorded in 1978), Pym includes “a splendid chardash,” from “Die Fledermaus” by Johann Strauss, which reminds her of “old Vienna,” a “romantic period that I like to be reminded of,” and chooses a case of German white wine as a luxury item (perhaps thinking of Niersteiner). The interview is archived on the BBC Radio 4 website (Pym 1978).
- 66.
Julian Amery had a colorful wartime life, which Pym followed as well as she was able, and he went on to have a distinguished political career. His father, Leopold Amery, worked under Churchill. His older brother John, who, in a fit of virulent anti-communism, attempted to recruit English soldiers to fight on the side of the Nazi party, was hanged for treason. Julian tried in vain to refute the charge by attempting to locate (ultimately nonexistent) evidence that John had obtained Spanish citizenship (Faber 2005: 327). In their days together, Amery told Pym that his brother was “more charming and more cruel than he was” (MS Pym 103, 71r). Pym also followed the fortunes of John Amery and records his 1945 trial in her date book (MS Pym 111, July 30). Julian Amery eventually married Catherine Macmillan, the daughter of Harold Macmillan, an event that Pym also marked (MS Pym 146, 28v).
- 67.
Thirty years later she used a similar seasonal renewal to describe Leonora Eyre, the primary character in The Sweet Dove Died: “Although it seemed as if a part of her had died in the hard cruel winter which had taken James from her, the spring had revived her in some way” (SDD 195).
- 68.
Faber (2005: 320–321) cites “MS Pym 147/12&13, 1 June 1938, letter from JA.”
- 69.
- 70.
Pym often quotes this line from “Go, Lovely Rose,” by the seventeenth-century poet Edmund Waller.
- 71.
This was an important poem for Pym. During the war years, while living in Oswestry, she copied the first stanza of this poem into her commonplace book (MS Pym 83, 29r). In May 1979, 40 years later, she quotes the poem in reference to thinking of a title for her next (never-written) novel (Holt and Pym 1984: 328).
- 72.
See Holt and Pym (1984: 101–102) for remembrances of Amery and for her commemoration of his 21st birthday, in which she still thinks of him as a child.
- 73.
These are encased in plastic in MS Pym 146, along with the “sentimental journal.” For Liddell’s history, see Robert Smith (1995).
- 74.
This passage indicates the significance for Pym of the title, “The Lumber Room,” and a variation of it appears in that work, which was written first (MS Pym 6/2, 149r).
- 75.
From a favorite poem, “Thyrsis,” by Matthew Arnold.
- 76.
In April 1942, Hilary had heard that Amery was a major in the Persian army (MS 146, 28r).
- 77.
Sons of the Eagle. A Study in Guerilla War, published in 1948 by Macmillan. Pym also bought Amery’s second book, Approach March: A Venture in Autobiography, published in 1973 by Hutchinson; she retained both in her library (MS Pym 175).
- 78.
Her letters to the Harveys and Liddell, written in March and April 1938 and full of references to Amery, report on the progress of this novel, which she wrote in the “lovely marbled notebook” with “Beatrice Wyatt” on the binding (MS Pym 6/1-3, extant in the Bodleian collection) (Holt and Pym 1984: 72). It is unclear whether or not the “new novel” that she reports writing in October 1938 is “The Lumber Room” (Holt and Pym 1984: 86). In February 1939, she reports having “nearly finished” a novel that she will then make “improvements” to (Holt and Pym 1984: 88). In May 1939 she writes about making these “alterations” and thinks that the work “needs to be made more exciting” (Holt and Pym 1984: 90).
- 79.
The phrase is from “My Heart is Like a Singing Bird.”
- 80.
Focusing on Pym’s use of the “lumber room” as Beatrice’s choice of metaphor for her heart, Wyatt-Brown says that, in the case of Beatrice, “The lumber room acts like death; it reduces all feeling,” a technique she ascribes to Pym as well in coping with her failures in love (Wyatt-Brown 1992: 30).
- 81.
Cocking reconstructs in detail Pym’s relationship with Friedbert Gluck, based on evidence from her diary entries (1933–1939). See “Barbara Pym in Germany” (Cocking 2013a: 55–77).
- 82.
The letter (of August 1935) apparently responds to one from Pym which raised the question of her loving two people at once, Harvey and Gluck.
- 83.
Pym had another admirer in Hanns Woischnick. After receiving a “very affectionate letter” from him, she writes: “I did not realise that Hanns was at all fond of me. He says he will never forget me, but seems to think I am irretrievably Friedbert’s” (Holt and Pym 1984: 40–41).
- 84.
In December 1941, Hilary heard that Friedbert “has gone Anti-nazi” (MS Pym 107, 103v; Holt 1990: 72).
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Stockard, E. (2021). Elements of Continuity: Youth and the Oxford Years. In: The Making of Barbara Pym. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83868-3_2
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