20 Books of Summer 2022: The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer

 

When The Pumpkin Eater was first published in 1962 Penelope Mortimer was forty four years old and married to the barrister and author John Mortimer. She was the mother of six children (though only the last two were Mortimer’s) and was pregnant with her seventh.

It is easy to see, then, why this novel is described as autobiographical – it is, after all, the narrative of forty-something Mrs Armitage, the wife of Jake, a screenwriter with plenty of money. Mrs Armitage is the mother of numerous children (by various different men) and wants another. Jake does not want another. Jake persuades her to have a termination – although she insists, unconvincingly, that this is also her decision – and she is at the same time sterilised. Jake is – of course – not sterilised, and indeed, while his wife recovers in a nursing home, he impregnates one of 'his' actresses. Mortimer herself was persuaded by John to have an abortion and sterilisation, and during her recovery she too discovered that he was having an affair (with actress Wendy Craig, with whom he had a son.)

So far, so predictable.

But Penelope Mortimer did always have her own career; she was a novelist, biographer, journalist and film critic. And The Pumpkin Eater is so much more than the sad story of the Mortimers' relationship. It is a study – and one from the inside – of a woman falling apart. Mrs Armitage is defined by her husband and her children. She believes she loves Jake even as she uncovers his serial infidelities. She is far too intelligent to believe his lies and half-truths, but she wants to believe them. She does love her children, but as her mental state deteriorates she begins to question even this;

…there were my own children, who until recently I had loved and cared for….(but) on the hill, in the tower, there were no children to identify me or to regulate the chaos of time…I was alone with myself , and we watched each other with steady, cold, inward eyes: the past and its consequence, the reality and its insubordinate dream.

Jake is a piece of work who will say anything to get himself off the hook. When Mrs Armitage questions him about how many women he has slept with during their marriage, he changes his story each time he realises that he is cornered;

‘Did you sleep with Philpot?’

‘Oh Christ, why drag that up that old thing again? It’s centuries ago. It’s ancient history.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes of course I did.’

‘But you told me… that you hadn’t’

‘That’s right. I lied to you. What else do you expect me to do?’

‘How many (others)?’

‘I’ve told you! None!’

‘How many?’

‘Half a dozen. A dozen, I don’t know. What does it matter how many?’

Jake, typically, tries to blame his wife for his own transgressions;  

‘You did rather hand her to me on a plate, didn’t you?’

He has, however, ‘taken on’ the narrator and however many children she had at that time, and she is therefore expected to be grateful. When she and Jake inform her parents of their plans to marry, she is treated like a piece of property to be handed from one man to the other. Here is her father;

'I'm not having you crushing this boy with responsibility from the word go.'

‘I must say that for a young man with his life in front of him to saddle himself with a brood of children and a wife as plain feckless as this daughter of mine seems to me lunacy. Lunacy. ….If I give you a start, you think you can carry on from there?’

‘I hope so.’

‘…The first thing is to shed the load a bit. I suggest we send the elder children to boarding school. I have particulars of a couple of schools here, perhaps you’d like to look them over?’

He handed two leaflets to Jake…’

So between them Mrs Armitage’s father and husband decide to remove some of her children from the equation, just as later Jake will decide that she must not have the baby she is carrying, nor any more.

There is a reason, I think, why the narrator’s first name is never mentioned. ‘Mrs’ is her definition; wife, lover, mother. When she eventually realises that Jake will always cheat and lie, one half of the reason for her existence is lost. When, in a state of turmoil, she runs away, she discovers that her 16 year old daughter Dinah, is perfectly capable of looking after the younger children, and the other half of that reason goes too. At the beginning of the marriage she does at least have domestic drudgery to take her mind off things, but as Jake becomes wealthy, staff are employed to do the mundane chores, the cooking, cleaning and childcare. And if these are taken from her, what next? She doesn’t know. All she knows how to do is have babies.

In them (the children), in their memories and dreams, I existed firmly enough, however unrecognizable to myself. 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 bedmaking; 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. I shook thermometers, spooned out medicine; my face hung pinkly over the bath, suspended in steam, while I scrubbed at the free, tough flesh over a knee-cap, removing stains. I glowered, frightening, and then again sagged, sank, collapsed with the unendurable labours of a Monday. All this, and more, I saw myself perform in my children’s memories, but although I knew that at one time it was so, I could not recognize myself.

The tower that the couple have been building in remote countryside – and to which Mrs Armitage runs when she can stand things no longer – is surrounded by mists;

I sat and watched the wall of sky that rose ten feet away from my look-out window. Nothing else existed. Nobody else lived. …The high tower, rising like a lighthouse in a sea of mist, was inaccessible to reality…the images of my childhood had disappeared.

Mortimer brilliantly captures the fragmentation of a woman’s personality. She is adrift in the tower as she is adrift in life; she contemplates suicide but is afraid that she will even fail at that, ending up

…a broken mess on the gravel, bleating for help.

And in between this coruscating writing, Mortimer gives us wonderful set pieces. As a schoolgirl the narrator has tried to impress her friends with a wildly overblown description of her ‘relationship’ with the local clergyman’s son; when one friend comes to stay, it soon becomes clear that Ireen is an experienced flirt, determined to find a man, and also to show off her ‘sophistication’ to her naïve host. Ireen tells her she should be reading not the classics of English literature, but instead the advice and problem pages of magazines;

‘…there’s a cut-out picture of Clark Gable, and it says what to do about your spots. You really ought to read them you know. They’d do you much more good than that old Jane Eyre. I bet your mother’s never even said the word vagina to you, has she?....’

There’s also a funny/tragic scene when a young and self-important journalist comes to interview Mrs Armitage as the wife of the now-famous director, and asks her if she keeps cyanide in the bathroom cupboard to give to her children if the bomb drops (this is, after all, the 1960s; the Cold War threatens.) While he is taking his photos Mrs Armitage receives a phone call from the husband of one of Jake’s conquests; the information he imparts blows her life apart, unlike the nuclear strike that never comes.

In The Pumpkin Eater Penelope Mortimer addresses one woman’s struggle to find meaning outwith the domestic setting in mid-20^th century England (it does have a very 1960s feel to it, and in this it reminds me of Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year – there seems to have been a particular style of writing at that time, one that feels almost like a play), but her story encompasses every woman’s struggle, and those struggles are ongoing. Like so many wonderful novels, from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion, The Pumpkin Eater speaks to us all.

‘Beautiful…almost every woman I can think of will want to read this book’ (Edna O’Brien.)

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer was first published by Hutchinson in 1962. It was most recently republished by Penguin Classics in 2015.

Penelope Mortimer (image: wikipedia)