An Unsuitable Attachment
Read An Unsuitable Attachment Online
Authors: Barbara Pym
by Philip Larkin
'I sent my novel to Cape last week,' Barbara Pym wrote to me in February 1963. 'It is called (at present)
An Unsuitable Attachment.''
It was her seventh, 'which seems a significant number'. The significance was to prove greater than she could have ever imagined.
Barbara Pym was then in her fiftieth year. Her previous books had been well received by reviewers, and she had gained a following among library borrowers; it was time for a breakthrough that would establish her among the dozen or so novelists recognized as original voices and whose books automatically head the review lists. With this in mind, I had written to her in 1961 saying how much I liked her novels and suggesting I should do an article about them to coincide with the publication of her next, hinting that she should let me know when it was ready. She replied amiably, but was clearly in no hurry, and our correspondence lapsed; the letter I have quoted was the first for over a year.
She did not write again until May, and then, after a courteous page of generalities, it was to say that
An Unsuitable Attachment
had been rejected. Although she strove to maintain the innocent irony that characterized all her letters, for once it broke down: 'I write this calmly enough, but really I was and am very upset about it and think they have treated me very badly.'
Of course it may be that this book 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.
To have one's seventh book turned down by a publisher who has seemed perfectly happy with the previous six is a peculiarly wounding experience, and she felt it as such. It is also damaging: another publisher can be approached only from a position of weakness, weaker than if the novel were one's first. A second publisher sent it back saying 'Novels like
An Unsuitable Attachment,
despite their qualities, are getting increasingly difficult to sell', while a third simply regretted it was not suitable for their list.
What was to be done? I wanted to try it on my own publisher, but Barbara demurred: she wanted to put it aside, to rewrite it, to write something else, and several years went by in which she did all these things, but to no avail. The new book,
The Sweet Dove Died,
was rejected as firmly as its predecessor, and the revised
Attachment
was unsuccessfully sent to a second round of publishers, including my own. I wish I had gone ahead and written my article; the honour of publishing the first independent appreciation of her work went instead to Robert Smith, whose 'How Pleasant to Know Miss Pym' appeared in
Ariel
in October 1971.
It was a strange and depressing time — strange, because (as Mr Smith's article indicates) her books retained their popularity.
No Fond Return of Love
was serialized by the BBC in 1965, while Portway Reprints, that infallible index of what people want to read instead of what they ought to want to read, reissued five others. Depressing, because the wall of indifference she had run up against seemed as immovable as it was inexplicable. For over ten years she had been a novelist: now, suddenly, she was not. The situation was galling. 'It ought to be enough for anybody to be the Assistant Editor of
Africa
[which is what she was], especially when the Editor is away lecturing for six months at Harvard,' she wrote, 'but I find it isn't quite.'
In 1971 she had a serious operation, and in 1973 retired to live with her sister near Oxford. There her disappointed silence might have ended, but for an extraordinary accident. 'In ten years' time, perhaps someone will be kind enough to discover
me
,' she had written at the end of 1967, and this was precisely what happened. In 1977 the
Times Literary Supplement
published a symposium on the most over- and underrated writers of the century, and two contributors named her as the second — the only living writer to be so distinguished. The rest is, as they say, history. Her next novel,
Quartet in Autumn
, was published before the year was out, followed by
The Sweet Dove Died.
Cape began to reissue her earlier books, Penguin and Granada planned a series of paperbacks. She was widely interviewed, and appeared on 'Desert Island Discs' and in a TV film called 'Tea With Miss Pym'. All this she sustained with unassuming pleasure, but the irony of the situation was not lost on her.
An Unsuitable Attachment
, now that it is finally before us, clearly belongs to Barbara Pym's first and principal group of novels by reason of its undiminished high spirits. For although the technique and properties of her last books were much the same, there was a sombreness about them indicative of the changes that had come to her and her world in fifteen years' enforced silence. Here the old confidence is restored: 'Rock salmon — that had a noble sound about it,' reflects the vicar, Mark, at the fish and chip shop, buying supper for his wife Sophia and their cat Faustina, and the reader is back among self-service lunches and parish bazaars and the innumerable tiny absurdities to be found there. It is perhaps the most solidly 'churchy' of her books: Mark and Sophia in their North London vicarage are at its centre, and the Christian year — Harvest Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter — provide both its frame and background. 'One never knew who might turn up in a church on Sunday,' Sophia thinks, and it is this kind of adventitious encounter that once again sets her narrative moving.
The book's chief failing is that the 'unsuitable attachment' between Ianthe Broome, the well-bred librarian with ladylike stockings and brown court shoes, and the younger John Challow, whose own shoes 'seemed to be a little too pointed — not quite what men one knew would wear', is not sufficiently central to the story and not fully 'done', as Henry James would say. Potentially the situation is full of interest: John's soppy, rather common, advances, coupled with his borrowing money from her, seemed faintly threatening ('John had been intended to be much worse,' Barbara wrote apologetically), and their relation at one time seems poised for disaster. When this does not happen, its 'unsuitability' becomes rather academic, something felt more by the other characters than Ianthe herself, who 'lets love sweep over, her like a kind of illness' rather than agonize over differences of age and class.
Then again, it is a somewhat self-indulgent book, full of echoes. Sophia and her sister Penelope recall
Jane and Prudence
,
or even Dulcie and Viola from
No Fond Return of Love,
Sister Dew resembles Sister Blatt from
Excellent Women
; but other parallels are more explicit. Barbara Pym was always given to reintroducing characters she had used before, and sometimes this is fully justified (the conversation between Wilmet and Rowena in
A Glass of Blessings
about Rocky Napier is only fully meaningful if we have met him in
Excellent Women),
but the concluding chapters of
An Unsuitable Attachment
are a real
omnium gatherum-.
Esther Clovis and Digby Fox from
Less Than Angels,
Everard Bone from
Excellent Women
,
Wilf Bason from
A Glass of Blessings,
and perhaps most extravagantly of all an older but otherwise unchanged Harriet Bede (complete with curate) from
Some Tame Gazelle.
It is all rather like the finale of a musical comedy.
Do these blemishes (if blemishes they are) mean that Cape's rejection of the book in 1963 was justified? Recently I wrote to their Chairman, who at that time had been their Literary Adviser and in his late twenties, asking whether Barbara Pym had been 'dropped', as she believed, simply because her books did not suit the spirit of the decade and would not make money. He replied readily:
When
An Unsuitable Attachment
came in it received unfavourable reports. Indeed they must have been very unfavourable for us to decide to reject a new manuscript by an author for whom we had published several books. At that time we had two readers, both of whom had been here for many years: William Plomer and Daniel George. Neither then or at any time since has this company rejected a manuscript for commercial reasons 'notwithstanding the literary merit of a book'. Though of course the two must be relative to some extent.
The reports by Plomer and George were subsequently found and they confirmed that one was 'extremely negative' and the other 'fairly negative'.
The reader must make what he can of these two accounts. If her publishers are correct, it is surprising there was not someone at Cape prepared to invite Barbara Pym to lunch and say that while they had enjoyed publishing her books in the past and hoped to continue to do so in the future this particular one needed revision if it was to realize its potential value. It was the blank rejection, the implication that all she had previously written stood for nothing, that hurt.
But there is still much in
An Unsuitable Attachment
to cherish. The increasingly hilarious appearances of Faustina, for instance, and the role she plays in Sophia's marriage ('she's all I've got'), are original and penetrating; at times, indeed, one wonders if the book's title would not be more applicable to this relation than to Ianthe and John. Nor does it lack the occasional plangent sentence of the kind that give her books their special quality:
Oh, this coming back to an empty house, Rupert thought, when he had seen her safely to her door. People — though perhaps it was only women — seemed to make so much of it. As if life itself were not as empty as the house one was coming back to.
Barbara Pym made no further move to publish this unlucky seventh novel during her lifetime, preferring to concentrate on new books, but now that there will be no more of these it is right that it should be issued. If its confidence, or over-confidence, was its own undoing, it is still richly redolent of her unique talent as it was before that confidence was so badly shaken. Her followers will need no further recommendation.
In various conversations I had, over the years, with Barbara Pym about
An Unsuitable Attachment,
she spoke of ways in which she intended to 'improve' (her word) it. Some cuts have been made along the lines she had been considering — though nothing, of course, has been added.
A few short passages which have dated in a way that she would have found unacceptable have also been deleted.
The original, full text is now lodged with the Bodleian Library, Oxford, along with her other manuscripts.
H.H.
They are watching me, thought Rupert Stonebird, as he saw the two women walking rather too slowly down the road. But no doubt I am watching them too, he decided, for as an anthropologist he knew that men and women may observe each other as warily as wild animals hidden in long grass.
The situation had nothing particularly unusual about it —an unmarried man visiting the house he had just bought and wondering where he should put his furniture, and two women—sisters, perhaps—betraying a very natural interest in the man or the house or both. One day, he thought, we shall probably know each other, and for that reason he turned away from the window, not feeling quite equal to meeting the unashamed curiosity of their glances as they came nearer. But now the taller one, who looked older, was gazing rather ostentatiously away. The smaller one seemed to find it necessary to raise her voice, so that Rupert heard a sentence of their conversation before they passed out of earshot.
'The vicar's wife and her sister—isn't that just what we look like,' said Penelope Grandison, 'and laden with parcels too.
Not
the kind of people who have everything sent.'
'We've been shopping,' said Sophia Ainger, 'so of course we're laden.' She spoke rather absently for she was remembering a vase of stiff-looking artificial flowers of an unknown species, seen fleetingly in a funeral director's window, which now overlaid her memory of the bright Kensington shops and brought her back to the reality of her life in North London. The afternoon's shopping had been arranged to console her sister Penelope, who at twenty-five was still young enough to suffer disappointments in love as commonly as colds or headaches. On this occasion it was to be hoped that humiliation and hurt pride had been assuaged by a new pair of shoes and a many-stranded jet necklace—like early travellers taking presents to the natives, Sophia felt.