The Pumpkin Eater (2 page)

If
The Pumpkin Eater
reads like a work of catharsis, that's because in part it must have served as such. The forty-two-year-old Penelope wrote it at a great clip — she began it in November 1961 (its opening sentence, she noted, “lit up the dark corners of my heart”) and was done with it by spring — and under great duress. At the urging of her doctor, she had agreed to an abortion and sterilization after becoming pregnant for the eighth time (she had miscarried a seventh pregnancy two years earlier) at the beginning of that year. The womanizing John, meanwhile, had just impregnated one of his girlfriends, the actress Wendy Craig (who happened to be starring in his play
Lunch Hour
), an affair which Penelope unfortunately found out about just after having the termination procedure done in early March. Several months later, drowning in unhappiness, she was diagnosed as suffering from “involutional depression” and prescribed Cavodil, which left her feeling “half dead and quite uncertain.” In the fall of 1961, she rallied, turning to her writing to exorcise her demons, having discovered that “extreme despair is often the final stage of gestation.”

The Pumpkin Eater
is Penelope Mortimer's seventh novel; during her lifetime it was the most widely known and best received of her books. Through the scrim of fiction, it depicts her tumultuous yet addictive marriage to John with an unsparing eye for the foibles of the particular parties involved and for the weaknesses of the institution itself. (“We should have been locked up while it lasted, or allowed to kill each other physically.”) Large patches of it are written in dialogue, at which Penelope is nothing less than brilliant. It begins with a scene in a psychiatrist's office, set against “the tick of the clock” and “the hiss of the gas fire,” where clues to Mrs. Armitage's predicament — she cries all the time, worries about dust, and is pregnant with a child her husband, Jake, a rich film producer and screenwriter, doesn't want — are sought by the doctor through gentle but persistent inquiry, much to his patient's annoyance: “I thought I was supposed to lie on a couch and you wouldn't say a word. It's like the Inquisition or something. Are you trying to make me feel I'm wrong? Because I do that for myself.” Underneath the symptoms there is, above all — or at least this is what her doctor ferrets out — her “will to self-destruction.” He prescribes pills for “those little weeps” and psychoanalyzes her predilection for childbearing as stemming from her fear of the “messiness” of sex, and her distaste for sex “for the mere pleasure of it.” (To which she answers, true to deadpan form: “You really should have been an Inquisitor … Do I burn now, or later?”)

Soon enough, the whole story spills out. (It differs only in the details from Penelope's own, the most significant detail being that Mrs. Armitage is an appendage to her husband rather than a creative figure in her own right.) There are early marriages, the “bodyguard” of children, the breakdown in Harrod's (“I stand in the bloody great linen department and cry and cry quite soundlessly, sprinkling the stiff cloths with extraordinarily large tears”), the slow erosion of the love that once soldered the Armitages together, the affairs, the financial prosperity that brought a different way of life (“I imagined I'd have more time for Jake. But we all began to live alone, that's what really happened”), and a new house under construction (called, simply, “the tower”) that never becomes the family home it was intended to be. (“When we went there it looked bleak and foolish, like a monument to a disgraced hero, a folly built for some cancelled celebration.”)

At the novel's end Mrs. Armitage, having undergone the same abortion and sterilization that Penelope Mortimer did, has moved into the empty tower, “a cell of brick and glass,” “inaccessible to reality,” to ruminate on what has brought her to such a pass. She cuts herself off, takes the telephone receiver off its rest, orders no food. “I wanted to get away.” In an effort to form a persuasive image of herself that would help her to believe in the actuality of her own life, she thinks about her marriage of twenty-four years, her many children, and summons up the rites of homemaking: “I stood over stoves, stirring food in a saucepan; I bent and picked things up from the floor; I stepped from side to side in the ritual of bed-making; I ran to the garden calling ‘Rain!' and stretched up for the clothes-pegs, cramming them into one fist and hurrying in, bedouined with washing.” She considers and rejects the idea of suicide: “To be dead would be a perfect solution for me, I thought. But I couldn't bear the idea of pain, the possibility that I would be a broken mess on the gravel, bleating for help.” And then, at the end of the third day of her vigil, her children come to fetch her — “They came up over the brow of the hill spread out, like beaters” — followed by Jake. This unsentimental ending, true to the author's blisteringly disillusioned view of life, offers no more than a reconciliation of sorts — an inconclusive, tentative, and temporary reprieve from anguish.

Although
The Pumpkin Eater
was not Penelope's favorite book — that place was taken by a later novel,
Long Distance
— it is the one that garnered her the most critical acclaim, with the film version no doubt helping to broaden its audience. Its reception did not fail to register with Penelope, but she didn't seem quite to know what to make of it, given the exigencies of her own drama-filled life: “The success of
The Pumpkin Eater
pleased me,” she wrote in
About Time Too
, “though I couldn't understand it. The literary establishment, with its clubs and societies and guilds and conferences, wine and cheese, coffee and buns, was kindly. Lacking any urge to join in or get together or be organized I didn't understand what it was for, and I still don't. Perhaps I missed many golden opportunities — but to do, to be what? Nothing I wanted.”

The response, in its “is that all there is?” sense of desolation, is vintage Penelope, but what she had written is in fact a lapidary classic of the interior life. I have read
The Pumpkin Eater
several times and never fail to be surprised by its immediacy, the way it has of bringing you into its confidence, as though you and the distraught, isolated woman at its center were old friends. Despite the passage of more than four decades, its concerns — the essential differences between men and women when it comes to matters of love and sex, the loneliness at the heart of life that can't be assuaged by marriage or children — have not dated. It could have been written yesterday, and in its lucid examination of the fragility that haunts even our most robust endeavors I suspect it will have something urgent to say to generations of readers to come.

In real life Penelope Mortimer would continue to experience anguish of all sorts; her keenest sense of herself seems to have been that of “pressing my nose to the world's window like some famished outcast.” She had trouble letting go of her obsessive relationship with John even as they lived apart, failed to find gratification from her literary acclaim, and missed her children — especially her son, Jeremy — as they grew up and away. But finally she was resilient; she didn't go the way of Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. She continued to write, came to New York to teach, and made it through to the age of eighty-one, living on her own in a cottage in the Cotswolds, where she had become an avid gardener. “Owning land,” she wrote at the close of her second memoir, which ends in 1978 (although it was only published in 1993), “made some stubbornly preserved part of me emerge rampant, sweeping the rest out of sight.”

— D
APHNE
M
ERKIN

For John

“Well,” I said, “I will try. I honestly will try to be honest with you, although I suppose really what you're more interested in is my not being honest, if you see what I mean.”

The doctor smiled slightly.

“When I was a child my mother had a wool drawer. It was the bottom drawer in a chest in the dining room and she kept every scrap of wool she had in it. You know, bits from years ago, jumpers she'd knitted me when I was two. Some of the bits were only a few inches long. Well, this drawer was filled with wool, all colours, and whenever it was a wet afternoon she used to make me tidy her wool drawer. It's perfectly obvious why I tell you this. There was no point in tidying the drawer. The wool was quite useless. You couldn't have knitted a tea-cosy out of that wool, I mean without enormous patience. She just made me sort it out for something to do, like they make prisoners dig holes and fill them up again. You do see what I mean, don't you?”

“You would like to be something useful,” he said sadly. “Like a tea-cosy.”

“It can't be as easy as that.”

“Oh no. It's not at all easy. But there are other things you can make from wool.”

“Such as?”

“Hot water bottle covers,” he said promptly.

“We don't use hot water bottles. Balls you can make, for babies. Or small golliwogs.”

“The point you are trying to make is that tidying the wool is a useless and probably impossible task?”

“Yes.”

“But you are a human being. The consequences of your … muddle are more grave. The comparison, you see, is not a true one.”

“Well, it's how it feels to me,” I said.

“When you cry, is that how it feels? Hopeless?”

“I just want to open my mouth and cry. I want to cry, and not think.”

“But you can't cry for the rest of your life.”

“No.”

“You can't worry for the rest of your life.”

“No.”

“What do you worry
about
, Mrs. Armitage?”

“Dust,” I said.

“I'm sorry?”

“Dust. You know? Dust.”

“Oh,” he said, and wrote for a while on a long piece of paper. Then he sat back, folded his hands and said, “Tell me about it.”

“It's very simple. Jake is rich. He makes about £50,000 a year, I suppose you'd call that rich. But everything is covered with dust.”

“Please go on.”

“It's partly the demolition, of course. They're pulling down the houses all round us, so you have to expect a bit of dust. My father bought the lease of the house for us when we got married, that was thirteen years ago.”

“You have been married for thirteen years,” he said, writing it down.

“To Jake, yes. There were thirteen years of the lease to run when my father bought it. He bought it for £1,500 and we pay a peppercorn rent, so you see we're very lucky. Anyway. I was trying to tell you about the dust.”

“So your lease expires this year.”

“I suppose so. We're building a tower in the country at the moment.”

“A tower?”

“Yes.”

“You mean … a house?”

“No. A tower. Well, I suppose you could call it a house. It's a tower, though.”

He put his pen down carefully, with both hands, as though it were fragile. “And where is this … tower?” he asked.

“In the country,” I said.

“I realize that, but — ”

“It's on a hill, and down in the valley is a barn, where I used to live before I married Jake. That's where we met. Now can we get back to the dust, because …”

“Of course,” he said, and picked up his pen again.

I tried to think. I stared at him, silhouetted against the net-curtained window of the consulting room. I heard the tick of the clock, the hiss of the gas fire. “I've forgotten what I was going to say.”

He waited. The clock ticked. I stared at the fire.

“Jake doesn't want any more children,” I said.

“Do you like children, Mrs. Armitage?”

“How can I answer such a question?”

“Could it be a question that you don't wish to answer?”

“I thought I was supposed to lie on a couch and you wouldn't say a word. It's like the Inquisition or something. Are you trying to make me feel I'm wrong? Because I do that for myself.”

“Do you think it would be wrong not to like children?”

“I don't know. Yes. Yes, I think so.”

“Why?”

“Because children don't do you any harm.”

“Not directly, perhaps. But indirectly …”

“Perhaps you don't have any,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Three. Two boys and a girl.”

“How old are they?”

“Sixteen, fourteen and ten.”

“And do you like them?”

“Most of the time.”

“Well, then. That's my answer. I like them most of the time.”

“But you have …” He glanced at his list and made do with, “a remarkable number. You seem upset that your husband doesn't want any more. This hardly sounds like someone who likes children most of the time. It sounds more of …”

“An obsession?”

“I wouldn't use that word. Conviction, perhaps, would be nearer the mark.”

“I thought I was meant to lie on a couch and talk about whatever came into my head.”

“I'm not an analyst, Mrs. Armitage. I simply want to find out how you should be treated.”

“Treated for what?”

“We don't know yet, do we?”

“For wanting another child? Is that why Jake made me come to you? Does he want you to persuade me not to have another child?”

“I am not here to persuade you of anything. You came of your own free will.”

“In that case I do everything of my own free will. Crying, worrying about the dust. Even having children. But you don't believe that, do you?”

“I'm not here to believe you, Mrs. Armitage. That isn't the point.”

“You keep saying you're not here to do this, that and the other. What
are
you here for?”