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MATTHEW SCHNEIER
NYT Syndicate
Barbara Pym, the midcentury English novelist, is forever being forgotten, and forever revived. Her novels sketch a circumscribed scene whose anchors were the church and the vicarage, and the busy, decent Englishmen and -women (more women) who shuffled between the two. To read her, one must have an appetite for endless jumble sales and whist drives, and the interfering wisdom of dowagers and distressed gentlewomen.
Pym's is an unsexy milieu, quaint even in her own time, and after publishing six novels between 1950 and 1961, she found herself unceremoniously dumped by her publishers. So began her first sojourn in obscurity."This was the time when the so-called Swinging Sixties were starting," she once said,"and I think quite a lot of publishers had the idea that the kind of thing I was writing was neither salable nor liked by readers."
But Pym has always had champions among the discerning. She had her first revival when, in 1977, The Times Literary Supplement asked a number of prominent writers whom they considered the most underrated author of the century; she was the only writer to receive two votes (one from her friend poet Philip Larkin). Suddenly her books sailed back into print. Her next novel, Quartet in Autumn, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year.
Enduring fame did not exactly follow. Six years later, Anatole Broyard cited Pym as"evidence that the English will never, God bless them, run out of obscure novelists suitable for reading." Lately, she has found new favour ” The New Yorker noted"a Pym-like sensibility" on websites like the Hairpin and the late Toast ” although it is still more common to find readers who mean to read Pym than those who have actually read her.
But you should. However remote her themes may seem ” a churn of parish politics and petty romances ” beneath the gentle surfaces of her novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip. She is a shrewd observer of a certain kind of middle-class woman, no longer young and not quite beautiful, whom society finds it easy to overlook. And she is just as shrewd an observer of the people (fatuous romantic idols, doddering priests, love-struck bed-sitters) that these women, vigilant and perceptive, themselves observe.
It is no coincidence that Mildred Lathbury, the spinster heroine of Excellent Women (1952), Pym's most famous and most perfect novel, is caught at its outset watching her neighbours move in,"as if I had no right to be discovered outside my own front door."
"I suppose an unmarried woman just over 30, who lives alone and has no apparent ties, must expect to find herself involved or interested in other people's business," Miss Lathbury goes on,"and if she is a clergyman's daughter then one might really say that there is no hope for her."
Here is Pym's"truth universally acknowledged," as Jane Austen's was, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Pym is often compared to Austen, whom she revered. But Pym's comedy is of a grayer-shaded kind than Austen's effervescence.
Mildred is one of the"excellent women" of the title, a designation Pym wields both ironically and sincerely. These excellent women are excellent ” they volunteer, they go to church, they subsist modestly on small chops and simple suppers ” but they can also be dowdy and difficult. They busybody their neighbours and ministers, whether they intend to or not.
That these excellent women remain nearly invisible to men gives them a sort of second sight into men's shortcomings, a clarity that their more tempestuous counterparts lack coupled with a charity their targets scarcely deserve. But their insight refracts back on themselves. Is there a sadder self-abnegation in literature than Mildred's dejected laundry-hamper admission that hers are"just the kind of underclothes a person like me might wear, so there is no need to describe them"? (There a chapter ends, nail firmly pounded into coffin.)
Would you believe me if I told you that Excellent Women is a marriage comedy? You'd be forgiven for not knowing, even if you finished it: The novel itself offers the possibility that excellent women"are not for marrying" (so a lunch date, anthropologist Everard Bone, tells Mildred) and ends with its heroine's fate unsealed. You'd need to read a different Pym novel to learn that Miss Lathbury has gone on to marry Mr Bone. If the classic comedy ends in a marriage, Pym has displaced the denouement to a footnote in a follow-up novel. How's that for delayed gratification?
While Excellent Women is, in my view, the finest introduction to Barbara Pym, her entire canon is a treat. Here, five more to keep the ball rolling and the tea stewing (as many of Pym's characters prefer it).
A Glass of Blessings: One of Pym's finest, if unusual for its focus on married life and its forthright, mostly unconflicted treatment of gay companionship. Also features some of Pym's greatest supporting characters, including Wilmet Forsyth's tart, agnostic mother-in-law, Sybil Forsyth.
The Sweet Dove Died: Another Pym novel on"mature themes," The Sweet Dove Died concerns the passion of self-centred, elegant Leonora Eyre as she weighs the affections of an appropriate man, Humphrey Boyce, and his scandalously younger nephew, James.
Less Than Angels: One of Pym's sendups of anthropologists and their stuffy society, as they struggle with mating rituals (will it be magazine writer Catherine Oliphant or young student Deirdre Swann?) and professional advancement.
Some Tame Gazelle: Pym's first published novel, about two spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede, who live together (as Pym and her own sister, Hilary, eventually would). Gazelle is particularly notable for its lightly fictionalised portraits of the Pym sisters and some of Pym's Oxford acquaintances.
Jane and Prudence: A sweet novel counterpoising two classic Pym types: a flighty vicar's wife (Jane Cleveland) and a torrid young romantic (Prudence Bates), who met as tutor and pupil at Oxford and face the sometimes disappointing reality of their post-collegiate lives together.
