No Title Yet, No Escape

[Barbara Pym to Philip Larkin]

40 Brooksvill Avenue
11 December 1961

Dear Mr. Larkin,

The novel is getting on--no title yet, of course, and none of the splendid collection I have seems to fit it. Now I have to force myself to type some of the earlier chapters because that's the only way I can tell what it's going to be like--whether it is worth going on, and all those other depressing thoughts that come. But I can see now that it will get finished if I am spared. No--nobody has ever written about the 'art' of my books--sometimes they have been well reviewed--other times not at all. Excellent Women was best received--A Glass of Blessings worst!

I can't imagine you writing anything 'knowing and smart' (not even Jazz) so it must be only your own harsh self criticism--of course being so young when you wrote it, it would certainly be different from what you'd write now. Perhaps it is better not to publish anything before one's thirty--I mean novels. I wrote Some Tame Gazelle when I was 22. Then rewrote it about ten years later.

I don't think you are a 500-words-a-day-on-the-Riviera sort of writer--perhaps nobody is now. What would one do for the rest of the day, having spent the morning writing? Lead a worthless life, I suppose, and how pleasant it might be for a bit. Then one would get involved with the English church--there would be no escape.

Yours sincerely

Barbara Pym

-from A Very Private Eye: An Autobiograhy in Diaries and Letters by Barbara Pym / edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984) p. 204-05.

Oops!

Philip Larkin to Barbara Pym - 18 November 1961

32 Pearson Park, Hull

Dear Miss Pym,

. . . How is the novel going? If my suggestion was rash, it was so only because of my possible incapacity. If anyone has written about your books I haven't seen it, & I do think they deserve 'art' recognition as well as 'commercial' recognition, and this it wd be my earnest intention to give.

I can't bear to look at A. G. in W.*: it seems so knowing and smart. I did it when I was about 23, & hoped I was going to lead that wonderful 500-words-a-day on-the-Riviera life that beckons us all like an ignis fatuus from the age of 16 onwards, but alas I wasn't good enough. It is kind of you to mention it, though. I still get about 1 pound royalties every 6 months from it.

Your job sounds pretty tough. I am Secretary of the University Publications Committee, wch means handing in our few unsaleable opera to the OUP & generally acting as go between. Yesterday I found I had signed a contract on behalf of someone giving away an option on their next book, quite without authority. Luckily the Press isn't likely to insist on its pound of flesh. At least I hope not.

Yours sincerely,

Philip Larkin

*A Girl in Winter: A Novel (1947)

-from Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985 edited by Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber, 1992.) p. 334.

Looking back

[Barbara Pym (1913-1980) to Henry Harvey]

108 Cambridge Street

London S. W. 1.

9 February 1946

My Dear Henry,

Thank you very much for your letter. It came very quickly. I had an idea that I owed you one, though that would have been rather unusual, I mean, if it had been ten years ago. Yes, I 'did start it' , even if I was inspired by you or rather the sight of you in the English Reading Room. I even got Rosemary Topping to go and look in your books when you had left them for a moment to see what your name was. Does anybody ever do that now? I suppose not, though no doubt others are doing it at Oxford. I almost envy them--one seems to feel so little now, and life was certainly exciting then, full of splendours and miseries. . . .

-from A Very Private Eye: An Autobiograhy in Diaries and Letters by Barbara Pym / edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984) p. 178.