"Always sincere, not always serious": Robert Liddell and Barbara Pym

A little less than a year before his death, an account appeared in Gay Times (London, August 1991) of an interview that Robert Liddell had given to the novelist Francis King. Mr. King wrote:

Robert was a close friend of four of the most interesting women novelists of our time: Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning and Barbara Pym. How would he rate them? "Ivy was a genius, Elizabeth was a gifted artist. Olivia and Barbara were story-tellers who wrote well." One can imagine Barbara Pym gratefully accepting that verdict. One can also imagine Barbara Pym being furious at it.

I do not know whether Barbara Pym would have reacted in either of the ways which Mr. King imagined, but I was surprised to read this belittling estimate of her work. The estimate could not have been ill-considered, since it was not spoken casually, and it reflected similar assessments which Robert had made in conversation and writing. But however carefully Robert had given this opinion and however firmly he held it, he was, I suggest, rash to make a comparison and ungenerous to express so simplistic a conclusion about a fellow writer with whom he had been associated in friendship for over fifty years and to whom he had given much friendly criticism, advice, and encouragement. Nor does his estimate accord with opinions of Barbara's work which he had published after her rediscovery and her death, when he was coming, gradually and somewhat reluctantly, to terms with the importance that critics, especially in America, were according to her work.(2)

Barbara Pym met Robert Liddell at Oxford in 1933, through Henry Harvey, a post-graduate at Oxford. From 1933 to 1938 Robert was an assistant in the Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library. It was here that he came upon the letters of Mark Pattison which provided the theme, and much of the material, for his first published novel, The Almond Tree (1938). Meanwhile Barbara's attachment to Henry Harvey extended into a comradely affection for Robert. She was impressed by the knowledge, wit, and self-confidence of the two young men, only a few years older than she was, and, as we know from A Very Private Eye (Holt and Pym 10), she felt "intellectually inferior" to them.(3) Yet despite this excessive modesty, she was already developing her own tastes in English literature and was encouraged in these by her two friends, particularly by Robert. From the late summer of 1934, when Henry Harvey left for Finland, Robert assumed greater importance in her life, and a correspondence began between them which lasted until her death in 1980.(4) In a letter to Henry Harvey in 1936 she analyzes this triangular relationship, and concludes: "But however much Jock [Robert] may be responsible for the state of affairs between us, I can never forget that he saved me a great deal of unhappiness by his way of looking at things, which I adopted too, at least in our correspondence and conversation. It is an amusing game . . . (Holt and Pym 56-57). This tells us that it was from Robert, at least in part, that Barbara learn to meet her problems, especially her emotional problems, with a rueful, amused acceptance, externalizing them in a way which she tried, not always successfully, to maintain throughout her life. It is an outlook which permeates and characterizes her novels, and one which was remarked upon by Philip Larkin, who wrote that in her books "Amusement is constantly foiling more pretentious emotion. But emotion is there all the same" (Required 241). It is, I think, in this somewhat imponderable quality of Barbara Pym's work that we may recognize the literary influence of Robert Liddell, rather than in the admiration which both gave to the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett and to Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper.

As well as the departure of Henry Harvey for Finland, summer 1934 saw Barbara Pym beginning her career as a novelist as she wrote the first version of Some Tame Gazelle. This lighthearted book, intended as an imaginary portrait of herself, her sister Hilary, and their friends in their middle age, went through several recessions before the Second World War. Robert delighted in the work, which he saw at all stages, made many suggestions for its revision, and encouraged Barbara in her efforts to find a publisher (Liddell A Mind 11-16). As early as July 1934 he was writing to Barbara that "Henry and I think you are a very great novelist and implore you to continue your story - we long to know more about Barbara and Hilary and the Archdeacon's family and Miss Tracy and Dr. Liddell. Henry thinks you are far greater than Miss Austen. I don't quite agree, though I place you well above Brontes" (MSS Pym 153, RL to BP, 30 July 1934). This, of course, was not quite serious, and at another time he was urging her to make the book "a little more professional, and less home-made" (RL to BP, 24 June 1940). He also encouraged her to continue attempts to set a novel in Helsingfors (as it was then called), writing to her for example in 1937, "Pray go on with your Finnish novel" (RL to BP, 16 Nov. 1937), although the following year he was so critical of the Finland novel that she was reduced to tears (February 1938: A Very 64).(5) In the meantime Robert was following The Almond Tree by publishing Kind Relations (1939) and The Gantillons (1940). Barbara had read and commented on the manuscripts of both these books (MSS Pym 158, n.d., filed in 1936; 155, RL to BP, 4 May 1940). From this period too comes the long letter to Barbara in which Robert describes his visit in March 1939 to Crete, reproduced in the first pages of his Aegean Greece (1954).