The Pumpkin Eater Read Free

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.”
    â€” D APHNE M ERKIN

THE PUMPKIN EATER

Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater,
    Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.
    He put her in a pumpkin shell
    And there he kept her very well.

For John

1
    â€œWell,” 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.
    â€œWhen 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