The ObserverFictionAs her 1962 novel The Pumpkin Eater becomes a Penguin Classic, Rachel Cooke re-examines the life of Penelope Mortimer, who tackled difficult subjects in a style that still sounds vital todayOn 27 March 1956, Penelope Mortimer, a 37-year-old novelist and mother of six, took up her pen at home in Swiss Cottage, north London, and opened her diary. “Perhaps soon I shall begin to write another book,” she scribbled. “But there’s no real confidence. I’m frightened of being smart, of not feeling sufficiently, of not being – do I mean sincere? I don’t know. I sit in the chair and smoke and think, I can’t sit here much longer; and go on sitting. I drive to John Barnes [a nearby department store] and walk around the bales of material, even sometimes feeling it, touching it; thinking, I know quite well I don’t want to, shan’t buy any… Some day I shall write about this.” According to Valerie Grove, the biographer of Mortimer’s second husband, John Mortimer, later she returned to this entry and annotated it with two words: Pumpkin Eater.
The years ticked by. There followed a novel, her third, called The Bright Prison, which sank without trace, and a travel book, With Love and Lizards. In 1958, she published the plangent, excoriating Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, whose heroine, Ruth Whiting, is trapped in a stockbroker village while her duplicitous husband, Rex, messes about with a girl in London. In 1960, the short stories she had written regularly for the New Yorker were collected as Saturday Lunch With the Brownings. Finally, in 1962, she published a novel that was indeed inspired by the lines she’d written in her journal six years before. Its narrator, Mrs Armitage, has suffered a breakdown: in the linen department of Harrods she found herself sprinkling the “stiff cloths with extraordinarily large tears”. Mortimer called it The Pumpkin Eater, from the nursery rhyme (“Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater/ had a wife and couldn’t keep her”). And now, at last, she had a hit on her hands. “Almost every woman I can think of will want to read this book,” said Edna O’Brien. The next year it became a film, starring Anne Bancroft and Peter Finch. The screenplay was by Harold Pinter.
If Mortimer was surprised by her book’s success – on reading the first (good) review, her relief was so great, she vomited – she would be astonished to hear that, next month, Penguin will publish The Pumpkin Eater as a Modern Classic. In the 60s, when she and John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole, were seen as a radical young couple about town – Penelope, extraordinarily beautiful, slunk about in jeans and a leather jacket, a cigarette permanently between her lips – she was much feted (among other things, she succeeded Penelope Gilliatt as the film critic of the Observer). But in the 70s, as her novels grew more desolate and her husband – or ex husband; they divorced in 1971 – more famous, her star began to fade. The first volume of her memoirs, About Time (1979), won the Whitbread prize but the second, About Time Too (1993), sold so poorly, her publisher turned down a third instalment. In the years before her death in 1999, she spent more time in her garden than at her desk.
Today, she is hardly read at all. Persephone wrapped Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting in one of its lovely grey jackets in 2008, but otherwise her books have mostly remained out of print. Why, is anyone’s guess. While the novels of some of her still-celebrated male contemporaries (Kingsley Amis, say) have come to seem somewhat bombastic and dated, Mortimer’s style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel (she set great store by Raymond Chandler’s belief that: “Scarcely nothing in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines”).
She captured the times every bit as deftly as any angry young man. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting and The Pumpkin Eater both anticipate Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), dealing with what its American author would call “the problem with no name”: the madness that was born of being a certain kind of wife, with a certain kind of husband; of the suffocating feeling that life was going on elsewhere. They also deal frankly, even bracingly, with abortion, then still illegal. In Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, Ruth arranges one for her student daughter, Angela. “Just think,” Angela says to her. “Tomorrow I’ll wake up and it will all be over. I can’t wait. I’m happy. You see?” In The Pumpkin Eater, Mrs Armitage’s husband, Jake, urges her to have a termination (she agrees), on the grounds that they have plenty of children already.
Mortimer was born in Rhyl, Wales, the daughter of a clergyman who had lost his faith. She always wanted to be a writer, but life would get in the way – which is, perhaps, one reason why her novels are so intensely autobiographical (their emotional force derives from her great skill, but also from the powerful sense that Mortimer knows whereof she speaks). In 1937, having dropped out of university, she married Charles Dimont, a journalist; they had two daughters. She then had two affairs, each one of which produced another daughter. She and John Mortimer married in 1949, on the day her divorce became absolute, and had two children together. Their relationship, happy at first, soon grew stormy. The Pumpkin Eater was written in the same year that she agreed, at his urging, to an abortion and sterilisation (having suffered a miscarriage, she was pregnant yet again at the age of 42). At first, she felt “radiantly grateful” to her husband: “I had been given the gift of an unused life.” But during her convalescence, she discovered his affair (with the actor Wendy Craig, by whom he had a son). It was a devastating blow. “All I want is for it to be over,” she wrote, sunk low by depression. “When John goes in his neat tie and suit to meet the people to whom he has to talk, I am physically afraid. Was a time when I could pull myself together… Not now.”
Will Penguin’s new edition of The Pumpkin Eater encourage people to look again at Mortimer? I hope so. She is so good. I can’t think of a writer more attentive to emotional weather. (“We were snug, almost riotously snug, in the study,” she writes in The Pumpkin Eater, describing when Mrs Armitage keeps watch over the laid out body of her father with her mother: that “riotously” is pure Mortimer.) So where to begin? Well, with the other novels, of course. But I also recommend About Time Too, which comes complete with walk-on parts for, among many others, Kenneth Tynan, Leslie Phillips and Bette Davis (“Ten years!” Davis snarls at Mortimer, who was then working as a screenwriter. “Ten years since I had a fuck! What d’you think of that?”). Funny and unsparing, it comprises a quite devastating series of dispatches from the frontline of a war – between work and motherhood – that is, alas, still raging.
The Pumpkin Eater is published by Penguin (£8.99) on 2 July. Click here to order a copy for £7.19. An adaptation of The Pumpkin Eater will be broadcast on Radio 4 later in the summer, starring Helen McCrory as Mrs Armitage
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