Barbara Pym's Novels Are Quiet Tales

            Barbara Pym is the least flashy of the tremendously readable English women novelists who are the heirs of Virginia Woolf: Elizabeth Bowen, Pym, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Iris Murdoch. I don’t intend to write about all these women, but this is the second of my reactions to my favorites: Pym, Bowen, and Fitzgerald.

            She had a curious career in that for fifteen years no one wanted to publish her, though she had a loyal readership beginning with the publication of her first novel in 1950, and though she died in 1980, all of her books are still in print forty years later.

            She published nine novels during her lifetime, and several apparently finished or nearly-finished manuscripts have been posthumously published. Pym’s are quiet tales. She tends to center them on small societies surrounding a vicarage, either rural or suburban, or the people working in an office, or a pair of women who are siblings or close friends. Often we find at the end of one of her books that things have not much altered. This pattern is set in her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle (1950). Though proposals, rumors of engagements, and actual engagements abound, at the end the Bede sisters are as they were. Belinda, having turned down the surprise proposal of the Bishop Mbawawa, “would continue to find such consolation as she needed in our greater English poets,” while “Harriet would accept the attentions of Count Bianco and listen patiently and kindly to his regular proposals of marriage.”

            In her second book, Excellent Women (1952), the concentration is on one woman. Mildred Lathbury is a 30-something spinster, active in her Anglo-Catholic parish where she is a friend of the vicar Julian Malory and his sister Winifred, working mornings at the society for Aged Gentlewomen. She is fond of Julian and may in her most fanciful moments imagine them as a couple. Her life is stirred up first when new renters come to her building: the undomestic anthropologist Helena Napier and her charming, handsome naval officer husband Rockingham. Through them Mildred meets another anthropologist, Everard Bone, who collaborates with Helena on field work and its writing-up, which eventually gives Helena the idea that more of a bond exists between them, and she leaves her husband. Mildred, who admits to being charmed by Rocky, acts reluctantly as a go-between in their reconciliation. The Napiers move to the country.

            Meanwhile Julian Malory is smitten by the attractive widow Allegra Gray, who rents Julian’s and Winifred’s spare rooms in the rectory. Julian proposes to Mrs. Gray, she accepts, and friction begins to build between Winifred, who is too dim to see she needs to move out of the rectory, and Allegra, who dislikes Winifred from the get-go. Winifred, humiliated by Allegra one rainy evening, runs to Mildred, Julian and Allegra have it out, and the engagement is broken.

            At the end, Mildred finds herself in much the same relation with the Malorys as before. When she insists she was not hurt by Julian’s engagement, we alone believe her—though she might have been disturbed about what he was getting into. She drifts into being useful to Everard Bone, which could go further, in a later book we hear of their marriage. These people are all very much what they are, and Mildred sees them clearly, and herself pretty clearly most of the time. The light touch of humor comes largely from this difference in self-awareness among the characters. Pym’s names are often humorously apt: the anthropologists include Mr. Bone and Miss Clovis, the new co-tenant of Mildred’s at the end is the Roman Catholic Miss Boniface, and while the doubtful women have names like Helena and Allegra, the excellent women are called Mildred and Winifred.

            Jane and Prudence (1953) is Pym’s funniest book. I often appreciate the subtle humor of the other books, but reading this one I found myself laughing out loud. Jane is a little bit bumbling, a little too much of a literary type than seems quite suitable, in her eyes, for a rural clergyman’s wife. She thinks much more than she allows herself to say, and “a not quite appropriate quotation would come into her mind on nearly every occasion,” usually from love poetry of the seventeenth century. She is awkward, backing into people and begging off pouring coffee on account of clumsiness. She’s also very perceptive and self-aware, but her perception works best directed outward, as I suppose everyone’s does.

            Prudence is pretty, but vain, a bit apt to think nostalgically of all her past conquests, while in the present she makes absurd choices, at first attaching herself hopelessly to her aloof boss, Arthur Grampian, who is often not even aware she’s in the room. Then Prudence accepts Jane’s misguided matchmaking, which pairs her with a handsome widower, older and even vainer than herself, who is then maneuvered into marriage under prudence’s nose by the mousiest woman in Jane’s village. Prudence consoles herself by vacationing with a young man in Grampian’s office, which cushions the pain and allows her to condescend in her treatment of the men like Grampian she’s left in the wake of her love life.

            But even at their most distracted and foolish, these women are smarter than the men around them. Jane muses at one point about women’s part in romance, thinking “that was why women were so wonderful; it was their love and imagination that transformed these unremarkable beings. For most men…were undistinguished to look at, if not positively ugly.”

            The book ends with Jane again contemplating making a match for Prudence, this time with the parliamentary member for her district, while Prudence thinks beyond her current young man to “the richness of her life” and the “many more evenings before us if we want them.”

            Less Than Angels (1955) breaks a pattern is some ways, since the little community Pym is laying out for us is an academic one of anthropologists and their students. The tables re turned, as it is Catherine, the main character and a writer, who does the studying of human behavior, with her subject the subculture of anthropologists who teach, do field work, and find mates.

            Many readers think Pym’s next book, A Glass of Blessings (1958), her best book, but I cannot agree. I think they’re impressed by her frankness with the subject of homosexuality at this date. So am I, but I would still vote for Jane and Prudence. We see A Glass of Blessings through the eyes of Wilmet Forsyth, whose desires to do good works or help with church functions in her parish do not rise above the level of velleities. Like Gillian Welch’s Miss Ohio, she wants to do right but not right now. She loves her dull husband Rodney after her fashion, but enjoys the flirtations of her friend Rowena’s husband Harry and Rowena’s brother Piers Longridge, whom she thinks something of a ne’er-do-well. But the idea of unfaithfulness does not even get up to the level of a velleity with Wilmet. When her vanity is not obscuring her vision, Wilmet sees clearly enough for Pym to exercise her gentle satire through this character’s first-person perceptions, which she can even occasionally turn on herself in the midst of a vain thought, at one point musing with chagrin about her “inability to accept even a pleasant smile from a clergyman at its face value.”

            The clergyman in question is the handsome new curate in Wilmet’s Anglo-Catholic parish, Father Ransome. Wilmet’s vanity may be the reason she fails to see the romance developing between Ransome and her friend plain Mary Beamish. Certainly it prevents her from perceiving that Piers Longridge, whom she imagines is the secret admirer who sent her an anonymous Christmas gift, is in fact gay. She only gets it when Piers takes her to meet Keith, his live-in partner, whom Wilmet first reacts to as “not quite us,” but learns to like for his humor and kindness.

            Wilmet doesn’t actively practice misguided matchmaking as Austen’s Emma does, but through her imaginary matchmaking and blindness to real matches she begins, like Emma, to learn something about herself. When dull Rodney confesses that he’s taken a coworker out to dinner a couple of times and has seen the inside of her flat, Wilmet gets a further shock. After some self-examination she pronounces herself happy and content with her lot.

            The book has the usual Pym complement of dithering clergy and the people who help them get through life (and are watchful no one trespasses on their turf while they’re doing it). The novelty here is that the cook for the vicar Father Thames (!) and his curates is a man—another one of Pym’s rather remarkable portraits, for 1958, of a sympathetic gay man—this one with a slight case of kleptomania.

            No Fond Return of Love (1961) again features two friends, Viola and Dulcie, but this time the two are interested in the same man, Aylwin. Their curiosity about him leads to Aylwin’s mother’s guest house, where, like Catherine in Less Than Angels, Dulcie, who is also a writer, observes the little society there. With few exceptions Pym’s theme is human observation, of oneself and others, and the way that observed behavior and emotion is changed by affection, infatuation, disappointment, and all that occurs to take us from the serene life we may imagine as an ideal.

            And then Jonathan Cape, Pym’s publisher, turned down her next manuscript. When she went to other publishers they also refused to publish it, and An Unsuitable Attachment never did find a publisher during her lifetime. For the next sixteen years no Barbara Pym book appeared. Then in 1977, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, each writing separately for a TLS feature asking literary notables who, in their opinion, was the most underrated writer of the 20^th century, both named Barbara Pym. Her career was relaunched. That same year she published Quartet in Autumn.

            After the hiatus Pym’s books have a slightly darker tone even when they make us smile, but Quartet in Autumn is undoubtedly her bleakest book. Two members of the quartet, Letty and Edwin, are people we would recognize from the circle of characters in Pym’s other books. Letty is a well-dressed, sixtyish woman, with no illusions about herself and able to read those around her, a reader but not intellectual, single, and in an awkward house-sharing situation since her friend with whom she was supposed to retire in the country has just gotten engaged to the vicar there. Edwin likes to visit Anglo-Catholic churches at lunchtime and in the evening, catching festivals and keeping up with the liturgical calendar. He is a widower, slightly younger than Letty, content with his family and church circles.

            The other two members of the quartet, ill at ease in social situations and lacking insight into themselves, do not read others well either and are apt to offend with sharp or satiric remarks. Marcia finds some little identity in her mastectomy, idolizing her surgeon from a distance and sharing vague details with strangers. Now, after retirement, she is neglecting her appearance, giving way to some of her obsessive habits, and eating practically nothing. Like Norman, she is inclined to answer sharply when spoken to, with little regard for others’ feelings, but she does not have Norman’s constant sarcasm.

            Little happens here, apparently, but lives are changed. Letty’s friend’s engagement falls through, so she has the choice to go to the country again. Marcia gradually dies of inanition and reveals, through the gift of her house to Norman, an apparent connection well-concealed on both sides. Norman, too, has more choices now. As for Edwin, there are churches all over London.

            Pym’s penultimate novel is The Sweet Dove Died, published in 1978. Leonora Eyre, an elegant, aging, self-absorbed spinster who wants the admiration and companionship of men but abhors the thought of sex, meets the widowed antiques dealer Humphrey Boyce and his nephew James at a sale of old books. Humphrey considers himself the more suitable companion and perhaps lover for Leonora, but though she enjoys Humphrey’s attentions, she becomes infatuated with James. When James allows himself to be seduced by a young woman named Phoebe, Leonora uses Humphrey to humiliate her. But Leonora is outwitted by the bounder Ned, who becomes the gormless James’s lover, detaches him from Leonora, and holds onto him until some other handsome youth catches his eye. James’s attempts to make up with Leonora are politely received, but nothing more.

            Each of these flawed characters is partially self-aware, and the comedy often comes in interplay between the aware and the unaware parts in interior monologues, less often in dialogue between characters. But Pym knows the precise quantity and nature of the self-absorption defining every one of these characters. The author’s trick is not merely in continuing to make her people amuse us, but in preventing us from despising them; we recognize just enough of ourselves to keep us from doing that.

            At the beginning of A Few Green Leaves (1980), the last book published during Barbara Pym’s lifetime, Emma Howick is living in her mother’s cottage while she writes up the results of some unspecified anthropological research. She sees herself as a temporary resident and curious observer of village life. Emma becomes more interested and contemplates dropping her project to concentrate on a formal study of the village, and she begins making notes. At the end of the book, she has determined to stay, and we don’t know whether her notes on the village will turn into a book, just as we are uncertain whether her warming friendship with Tom Dagnall the rector will turn into a romance.

            While not her best book, A Few Green Leaves is a kind of culmination, combining features from Pym’s previous novels. She has alternated—in successive books and sometimes within a single book—between village and urban settings, returning to a village here, though it appears to be close enough to town that characters often show up for day trips or short stays. And we have here many of the topics she’s treated elsewhere: clergymen and their flocks, anthropologists and their often odd lack of interest in society, the whole subject of observation as it relates to anthropologists, sympathetic characters, and the novelist herself; the dynamics of a household where two women live together.

            Tom Dagnall, the village rector, is a little too interested in the history of his church and searching for a possible D.M.V., or deserted medieval village nearby. In a telling moment, he thinks about his failed efforts to keep a diary in the manner of such figures as James Woodforde. But what would he put in it, he asks himself. His sister’s conversation about a gooseberry tart and her plans to move to Birmingham? Would that interest readers of the next century? The answer, of course, is yes, if Barbara Pym’s practice is anything to go by. The seemingly mundane, closely observed by a sympathetic and mildly amused observer, is Pym’s and Woodforde’s stock-in-trade.

            A good deal happens in the book without causing much fuss. There is a death, though it is not, as we suspected for a moment, that of the ancient Miss Vereker, the governess in the days when the manor was occupied and its family was the village’s center; she has decided to take a day trip back to the village, telling no one of her whereabouts, and she takes a fall in the woods. But Miss Vereker is fine, and it is the “elderly village eccentric,” Miss Lickerish, who dies. The re-ignition of Emma’s old romance with a boring and ill-mannered anthropologist fizzles, and he goes back to his air-headed wife. Tom’s sister does move to Birmingham, giving up her dream of a retirement in Greece, where she has spent idyllic summers. Emma Howick finds a place to be and a life of interest.