The Pumpkin Eater

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
CLASSICS

PENELOPE MORTIMER (1918–1999) was born Penelope Ruth Fletcher in North Wales, the younger of two children of an Anglican clergyman father and his wife. The family moved often, and Penelope was educated at half a dozen institutions before spending a year at the University of London. In 1937 she married the journalist Charles Dimont, with whom she had two daughters. Two more daughters by two different men would follow before, in 1949, she divorced Dimont and married the barrister, novelist, and playwright John Mortimer, with whom she had another daughter and her only son. The Mortimers were celebrated as “the last word in marital chic,” but the marriage was tumultuous and the couple divorced in 1972. In addition to
The Pumpkin Eater
(1962), made into a 1964 film from a screenplay by Harold Pinter and starring Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch, Mortimer published several other novels, including
Daddy's Gone A-Hunting
(1958),
Long Distance
(1974), and
The Handyman
(1983); a travel book co-authored with John Mortimer,
With Love and Lizards
(1957); and a biography of the Queen Mother. She also served as a film critic for the London
Observer
and was a regular contributor of short stories to
The New Yorker
. The first volume of her autobiography
About Time
(1979) was awarded the Whitbread Prize and was followed by
About Time Too
(1993).

DAPHNE MERKIN is the author of
Enchantment
, a novel and
Dreaming of Hitler
, a collection of essays. Her cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including
Vogue
and
The American Scholar
, and has been widely anthologized. She has been a staff writer for
The New Yorker
, and is currently a contributing writer at
Elle
and
The New York Times Magazine
. She lives in New York City, where she teaches writing, and is at work on a memoir,
Melancholy Baby
.

THE PUMPKIN EATER

PENELOPE MORTIMER

Introduction by

DAPHNE MERKIN

New York Review Books

New York

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

THE PUMPKIN EATER

Epigraph

Dedication

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Copyright and More Information

Before the advent of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, before it became chic for housewives to swap stories of malaise the way they had once swapped recipes for Thanksgiving stuffing, and before a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown inspired interest rather than rolling eyes, there was Penelope Mortimer. She was a literary visionary of sorts, not quite of domestic darkness — there is always a brood of children present in her fiction to set off sparks — but of the claustrophobic grayness and casual betrayals of upper-middle-class marriage. In the late 1950s and early '60s Mortimer published a succession of novels —
The Bright Prison, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting
and
The Pumpkin Eater
— that might almost be taken as a trilogy, so similar is the existential condition that afflicts her protagonists. The dramas of her heroines — all of whom are transparently alter egos, although only
The Pumpkin Eater
is told in the first-person voice — are so low-pitched in their despair and so insulated by money that it is all too easy to write them off as cases of overwrought nerves, their condition brought on by too much time and too morbid a point of view. To do so, however, would be to overlook the human truths that inform these situations, the witty if often bleak intelligence that Mortimer brings to her dissection of the glitches — the unbearable muddles — that regularly occur in the most intimate of relationships, between mothers and their children or between husbands and wives.

Of the three novels,
The Pumpkin Eater
, published in 1962 when Mortimer was in her early forties, strikes me as the most accomplished and the one closest to the bone. (It was also made into a remarkable film in 1964, directed by Jack Clayton from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch.) Although Mortimer's style is always direct, in this account of a woman's emotional collapse and tentative recovery it becomes almost frontal in its urgency. One senses an impelling force behind the pages, as though they were scratched out on torn pieces of paper by someone marooned on a desert island of the mind, where resources are scarce and time is short. The effect is like that of reading a crucial but not fully decipherable message, one that might help us in our own travails if only we read it in time. “I have put into this novel,” Mortimer would explain to a television audience during a 1963 BBC reading of a scene from
The Pumpkin Eater
, “practically everything I can say about men and women and their relationship to one another.” From the opening pages of dialogue between the unnamed narrator (we know her only formally, as “Mrs. Armitage,” like a character in a Victorian play) and her psychiatrist to the book's concluding passage, in which the reader is assured that everything in this novel in a sense took place — “Some of these things happened, and some were dreams. They are all true, as I understood truth. They are all real, as I understood reality” — the reader is held willing hostage by a captivating, heedlessly honest voice.

Penelope Mortimer was born in North Wales on September 19, 1918, the younger of two children of an eccentric clergyman father and a self-effacing, industrious mother. Both her parents were on the old side for the role: her father was thirty-nine and her mother was forty-two. In her first autobiography,
About Time
(1979; she wrote a second,
About Time Too
, published in 1993), she vividly details her irregular vicarage childhood up until the age of nineteen, when she escaped into her first marriage. Her father comes off sounding like a character out of
Tristram Shandy
, pierced through and through with oddities of both circumstance and temperament — a preacher who didn't believe in God and who preached “splendid, meaningless sermons,” as well as a man of considerable sexual appetite whose wife no longer slept with him. According to Mortimer, her father was wont to do strange things, like showing her a spaniel puppy's genitals, throwing her brother out of the dining-room window, and attending séances. He also sexually molested her, although Mortimer passes off this piece of information so nonchalantly in
About Time
that it is hard to tell how much weight to give it. (This is, of course, the heart of her literary style, to make light of the traumatic while making visible the trail of damage it leaves behind.) In
About Time Too
she is much more direct: “My father ‘abused' me from the time I was eight until I was about seventeen…It seldom went further than sloppy kisses and inexpert groping in my school knickers, but I hated it and for the next fifty years was under the sad misapprehension that I hated him.” Her mother, meanwhile, kept busy decorating her home and the church with as much style as economy, delighting in all that made life more comfortable. “The mattress on her bed was always of a make called Vi-spring; she had a rubber hot-water bottle when the rest of us had to make do with stone ones; there was always a mohair rug available to tuck around her knees in a draft.”

With a lackadaisical education in place — Mortimer attended a secretarial school after finishing up at St. Elphin's School “for the daughters of the clergy” — and possessed of an intermittent yearning to write (“How would I ever be Virginia Woolf if I didn't learn something?”), she fled vicarage life for good. In rapid order she moved to London and attended London University with thoughts of becoming a journalist, then after an engagement of six weeks married a Reuters correspondent, Charles Dimont (“connected in my mind with a kind of obscure stability”), and became pregnant within two months. She was nineteen at the time, a dark, gamine beauty who years later would be momentarily mistaken by a waiter for Audrey Hepburn.

Dazzlingly attractive to men, as restless as she was willful, and prone to what her mother called “infatuations” — falling in sexual love — Mortimer seems to have spent her twenties setting up and re-setting up domestic households, having affairs, and giving birth to two more daughters. (The third one was not fathered by Dimont, who was off much of the time fighting World War II, but by a close friend of his whom he'd introduced to his wife.) In between she managed to write two novels, neither of them published. On September 6, 1946, she wrote in her erratically kept diary: “At the moment we have some money. I have a Nanny for children. I write, and may possibly become successful. We live at Willersey.”

Within a year of writing this entry, Mortimer was cavalierly pregnant once again, this time by a married poet named Randall Swingler. (She and Dimont were living apart.) More to the point, she had met a friend of Swingler's named John Mortimer, who was five years younger than she and already reading for the bar — “a clever, skinny, excitable youth,” as his wife-to-be dispassionately described him in
About Time Too
. John and Penelope became fast pals; they both were about to have their first novels published (Penelope's
Johanna
, John's
Charade
) and shared the same agent. She found him funny and companionable; he found her exciting and sophisticated. They also became lovers and when Penelope gave birth to Swingler's daughter (her fourth) at a Catholic nursing home in June 1948, John was the first visitor. Shortly thereafter, much to the astonishment of John's parents and friends, the two of them rented a seaside house and established a humming domestic life together, which John, a lonely only child, took to with great relish. According to John's biographer, Valerie Grove, “he cooked the girls' breakfasts, took them for walks, told them stories, wrote little plays.” On August 27, 1949, the Mortimers were married in a small ceremony; exactly nine months later (and two days after the publication of his third novel), John's first child and Penelope's fifth daughter was born.

The Mortimers' marriage, which eventually yielded another child, Penelope's only son, would become the stuff of both their writing. At the beginning it appeared to be a storybook marriage of the most glamorous sort, with Penelope whipping up clothes for the children on an ancient Singer sewing machine when she wasn't writing, weekend trips to Paris and jaunts to Rome, lots of friends and parties, and grand summer rentals. The early years, as recalled by Penelope, were also filled with blazing rows and impassioned reconciliations: “We make love, we quarrel, we make it up, we quarrel, we make it up, we make love.” In 1954 she published her second novel to what in hindsight seems like uneasy-making acclaim, with one reviewer calling it “a brilliantly successful attack on one of the most challenging fortresses of fiction: the spiritual and physical relationship of married life.”

Soon enough, the Mortimers' own real-life fortress was under siege, haunted by the ghosts of other women, and would remain so until its official dissolution in 1971. John had become involved in the first of what would prove to be many affairs, and Penelope, who had once been free and easy with her affections (despite her “prim objections to loveless sex”), was heartbroken. “All my life I had been used to absolute power,” she wrote in
About Time Too
, “[to] exclusive attention. Who was I, if I wasn't unique? No one I could recognize. John was correct in saying I was like someone who had lost an empire. I fixed the pieces of my self-esteem together in some semblance of the original, but the image was never quite the same.” Both of them resorted to amphetamines — “bennies and dexies,” as they were called — and went on partying, but in 1956 Penelope made a suicide attempt, after which she started seeing a Freudian analyst. When that failed — “My sense of the ridiculous,” she observed, “the only part of me that seemed to have survived more or less intact, got in the way” — she had a course of electroconvulsive therapy. That summer the Mortimers went to Positano at the expense of Penelope's publisher in order to write a book about living abroad with children,
With Love and Lizards
, and in 1957 Penelope was given a contract by
The New Yorker
for six stories a year. Despite the discord at home, the family was featured as a gleaming image of fecundity on all fronts for numerous newspaper and magazine articles, with John becoming ever more renowned for his plays and prowess at the bar.