Artist’s model, dog breeder, painter, writer, wife of a spy – Barbara Comyns (1909-92) certainly lived a wild life, which is reflected in her novels. Jane Gardam, who knew her in old age, says she seems to have experienced the same adventures as her heroines – “the adolescent marriages and escapes, the curious jobs, the poverty, the rescues, the bundled-up babies, the messy art-school Bohemianism, the fecklessness and the bravery. And the innocence.”
Comyns’s literary reputation has also swung between wild extremes. She made her debut in 1947 with Sisters by a River, and enjoyed her greatest success with her fourth novel, The Vet’s Daughter (1959). But then she seemed to be forgotten and didn’t publish anything for 18 years. It was only when Virago started republishing her in the 1980s that she found a new audience, and produced three more novels. This appears to be the pattern of her career – acclaim, followed by neglect, followed by revival. Luckily, she is in a revival phase now – Daunt and Turnpike Books are currently republishing some of her “forgotten” novels. And one of her bon mots – “maybe, the only way to get on is to be ruthless” – has even found its way on to a T-shirt.
So now is a good time to discover Comyns (pronounced “Cummins”) if you haven’t already, starting with her first book. Sisters by a River is a memoir of her childhood, written as a series of vignettes. She was the fourth of six children, patchily educated by governesses, but mainly left to run wild in a rambling manor house on the banks of the Avon. There were maids, cooks and gardeners, but also ducks, dogs, rabbits, caterpillars, a monkey and a peacock roaming freely through the house. Barbara didn’t have her own bedroom till she was 15 and would sleep in whichever bed happened to be available, which meant she once found herself sharing with a visiting accountant. The house was old and damp and smelled of “walnuts and church”. When the nearby river flooded, as it sometimes did, the children walked about on stilts, while bloated carcasses of sheep and pigs floated past, and villagers stabbed them to get the eels that congregated inside.
On summer weekends, the river was invaded by “trippers” who hired pleasure boats and often fell out of them, crying for help, but the children ignored them. Their mother, “Mammy”, married very young, at 18, had six children by the time she was 27, then went profoundly deaf – “perhaps her subconscious mind just couldn’t bear the noise of babies crying any more” – and stopped having children. She was vague before but got vaguer – sometimes she would summon the children and say “come and kiss me”, but other times she would say “how I wish I’d never had you”. She conversed with imaginary lovers and kept picking fights with “Daddy”, telling him she was unfaithful. Daddy was usually drunk and sometimes violent – he took a horsewhip to Barbara and punched Mammy so hard he gave her a black eye. Barbara remembers once seeing him throw a crying baby downstairs, but luckily a passing housemaid caught it.
Then one day, “Daddy fell down dead and we had to leave the house and have no money”. Barbara saw him lurch out of his bedroom, looking terrified, and crash to the floor. She ran to fetch the old doctor (he was 97) who said, “let him sleep it off”. But he didn’t sleep it off; he died of a stroke. And then all his relatives and creditors descended and confirmed that he had spent all his money and left a mountain of debt. The house had to be sold and the children sent off to find jobs. Barbara was 17 but got work as a kennelmaid in Cornwall, where she subsisted on dog biscuits, though later she got a place at art school.
Her next book, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), is a novel but still sufficiently autobiographical to give us a good idea of what came next. The story starts happily enough. Sophia, aged 20, meets a young man, Charles Fairclough, also 20, on a train. They are both carrying artists’ portfolios so they get chatting. Charles plans to be a serious painter, whereas she works in a commercial art studio. They decide to get married secretly when they turn 21. But Charles’s family are furious – his father cuts off his allowance and his mother rails at Sophia for entrapping her son. They are happily in love, but they are poor, and get poorer, especially when Sophia becomes pregnant. Charles is horrified – he never wanted a baby. And having a baby means she loses her job at the art studio, which is their only income. She is much in demand as an artist’s model (Comyns’s few photographs attest that she was a great beauty), but going out to work means leaving the baby with Charles and she discovers he has written to one of his aunts asking her to recommend a good orphanage. I won’t give any more of the plot away except to say the novel is really about the souring effects of poverty – Charles and Sophia get along fine when they can afford food but not when they are starving.
Money, or the lack of it, is a big theme in Comyns’ novels – many of her characters live on the breadline. The marriage depicted in Spoons was actually to an artist called John Pemberton and produced two children, Julian and Caroline, but it ended in about 1935. Then she lived with a dodgy garage owner and black marketeer called Arthur Price, and stayed with him for much of the war, making money by modelling, doing commercial drawings, breeding poodles, and dealing in antiques, classic cars and grand pianos. She describes these adventures in a much later novel, Mr Fox (1987), which is now being republished by Turnpike Books. When she split up with Price, she went to work as a cook in a country house in Hertfordshire and it was there that she wrote the vignettes that eventually became Sisters by a River. And in 1945, she made a respectable marriage to Richard Comyns Carr, whose father was president of the Liberal Party. Carr described himself as a civil servant but was actually a spy working for MI6 with Kim Philby and Graham Greene. Greene was a fan of Comyns’ work – he called her “a crazy but interesting novelist” – and published her first two books when he worked for Eyre and Spottiswoode.
Comyns claimed that MI6 dropped her husband in 1955 because of his association with Philby. She told Gardam: “Oh Kim was a delightful man. So funny. Always here playing cards. Neither of us had a notion! When he disappeared – to Moscow, you know – they sacked my husband. They said that either he must have known and therefore was a traitor, or that he hadn’t spotted it and therefore must have been a fool.” So the Comyns-Carrs moved to Spain and it was there that she wrote her most successful novel, The Vet’s Daughter, which was serialised by the BBC and made into a musical by Sandy Wilson. She wrote four more novels in Spain but with diminishing success and by the time the couple moved back to England, in 1974, she had given up writing and was concentrating on painting. (Her works, vaguely surrealist, featured “bright colours and bold images with not too much detail”.)
It was only when republished by Virago in the 1980s that she found the confidence to produce her first new novel for 18 years, The Juniper Tree (1985), which is one of her best. She also revised two old novels, Mr Fox and The House of Dolls, which had languished in a drawer, and saw them published before her death in 1992. Being published by Virago might lead people to assume that Comyns was a feminist but she really wasn’t. Her heroines are often mistreated by men but they are also apt to fall desperately, impulsively, in love. And they never seem to live entirely in the real world. Her biographer, Avril Horner, believes that Comyns was much influenced by tales of the supernatural told by her Irish grandmother. But she is never fey. On the contrary, her style is always cheerful, almost jaunty, even when describing the most terrible scenes. Greene praised her “strange offbeat talent… that innocent eye which observes with childlike simplicity the most fantastic or the most ominous occurrence”. You never quite know where you are with Comyns – which is what makes her novels so intriguing.
Daunt Books’ year-long revival of Barbara Comyns begins with Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. The House of Dolls and Mr Fox are published by Turnpike. Sisters by a River, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths and The Vet’s Daughter are published by Virago
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