Reading: Barbara Pym

As anticipated in my last post, as soon as I finished Remains of the Day, I picked up the final three posthumous novels of Barbara Pym that I had not yet re-read. Earlier in the year I read An Unsuitable Attachment (written 1963; published1982), which was the first of her posthumous works to appear. That novel had been rejected in the sixties by Pym's publisher, and she herself later found it wanting; although even with its flaws, real or imagined, it will likely endure (as will all of her novels) as a marvelous portrait of the characters and their times. The next three novels are very much in the nature of bonus novels rather than lost masterpieces: Crampton Hodnet (completed c. 1940; published 1985), An Academic Question (written 1970-72; published 1986), Civil to Strangers (written 1936; published 1987).  Each offers something memorable and entertaining, but they are all revisiting familiar territory in tone, theme, story, and characters. Nevertheless, I can still remember my excitement when each one appeared in print. I had only recently discovered Barbara Pym and had read through her published novels, so I was delighted to find that there would be at least a few more added to the original nine, or in my case ten, since I had already included An Unsuitable Attachment in my collection.

Crampton Hodnet is a very amusing story of village life, matchmaking, and eligible curates; it seems very much a reprise of Pym's favorite subjects, with more wry commentary on the difficulties her characters always have establishing intimacy. An Academic Question is yet another witty critique of academics and anthropologists. Some familiar characters from previous works make cameo appearances, and there is a touching funeral for one of Pym's more memorable female academics. One day I will attempt to discover who some of these people were in real life, since they are obviously drawn from her colleagues at the International Africa Institute. And, finally, Civil to Strangers is a suitable coda to her work, since it circles back to some of her earliest preoccupations, including her attempts to imagine what life as a married woman might be like. This last novel (actually her second, I believe, in order of composition) leaves us contemplating Pym's take on romance as well as her fear of commitment. It's tempting to read too much into these recurring themes, but it would be naive to deny their existence in all of the novels.

Once I finished Civil to Strangers, I read for the first time the additional stories and unfinished novels (or novellas really) that Hazel Holt included in the same volume. These truly are for Pym devotees. And while one could say with some justification that they could just as well have been left unpublished, once I'd read them I found each offered some further insights into Pym's style and narrative approach to storytelling. The first of the unfinished novels is Gervace and Flora, loosely based on Barbara Pym's own infatuation with Henry Harvey, from whom she was separated while he took up a teaching position in Finland. That is followed by her Home Front Novel, a humorous account of various "excellent women" coping with dozens of children and their teachers evacuated from London to the countryside shortly after war was declared in 1939. And the last is Pym's attempt to write a spy novel, So Very Secret, which is actually very entertaining, sort of Barbara Pym meets Foyle's War. The volume concludes with four short stories and the transcript of a radio broadcast Pym did for BBC describing her efforts to find her own style and individual narrative voice.

Looking back I see that I began the year with Barbara Pym, and now I've more or less brought it nearly to a close with the last of her fiction. I'm not sure I can really explain my fascination with her novels. Part of it is that voice of hers, the combination of penetrating insight and humor and wit expressed with a sort of British deadpan understatement that only slightly conceals the edge of satire and irony. It seems that all of her male characters are self-absorbed and more or less incompetent. Some are redeemed, in the eyes of Barbara's heroines, either by their good looks or their neediness, or by some combination of both. But there is scarcely a male character that any of her central females seems truly to desire as a permanent partner. Often her novels end with one (or more) of her excellent women having escaped romantic entanglement once again, back where they began, only happier now knowing that they are still in control of their own lives, alone perhaps, but nevertheless cosy and comfortable with a good cup of tea and an interesting program to listen to on the radio. I'm not sure why that should be appealing, but in a world such as ours has become, there is comfort in such stories of coping and making do.

And so having finished with the last volume of Barbara Pym's fiction, I suppose I'll turn next to her letters and diaries, which form the basis of A Very Private Eye, the autobiography put together by Hazel Holt and Pym's sister Hilary Pym. First, however, I've decided to look at some novels that Pym says influenced her writing, something of Ivy Compton-Burnett's and Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper. With that I'll be well past my declared goal of thirty books for the year, even if a few of those turned out to be rather short ones.