Crampton Hodnet
Pym, Barbara
William McGurn For those who have ever stumbled upon some unexpected treasure, there are few things more maddening than the effort to convey the full importance of one's find to one's friends and...
...William McGurn For those who have ever stumbled upon some unexpected treasure, there are few things more maddening than the effort to convey the full importance of one's find to one's friends and acquaintances∔if, that is, one wishes these friends and acquaintances to remain such...
...His introduction to Miss Morrow is a comedy of errors, and he begins to worry when he finds himself oddly attracted to this "thin, used-up looking woman in her mid-thirties...
...Yet sadness hovers everywhere...
...ting fuzzy in the head, all manner of curates and vicars, young women on the prowl for husbands, and, not least, women who have given up the search but live it vicariously through their myriad nieces...
...Though the book is a tad overwritten, and though the characters are somewhat raw compared with those of Miss Pym's later works, Crampton Hodnet is, as she herself noted, as good as anything she ever did...
...As she also added, it is "rather funny"∔in fact, it is probably her funniest...
...One must be reasonable and remember that falling in love is never ordinary to the people who indulge in it," says Miss Morrow...
...By story's end, everyone is searching for a diplomatic way out...
...One couldn't imagine them reading poetry together, she thought, this being her main idea of a happy marriage...
...A he story of these mismatched lovers and their painful loves is told with a keen sense of human foibles, muted by the English penchant for understatement...
...Nonetheless, Miss Bird∔the victim of an overly romantic (but ultimately arid) nature∔in her youthful egotism firmly believes Francis married wrong, and her abstract conceptions of True Love blind her to the practical but real charms of Mrs...
...46...
...Throughout, Miss Morrow penetrates to the core of the other characters∔mostly, this means to their faults∔without surrendering herself to cynicism...
...More to the point, Miss Pym shares with Miss Austen the understanding that the human heart is much the same everywhere...
...But it is through her paid companion, Miss Jessica Morrow, that the narrative is told...
...Miss Dogget's domain is Leamington Lodge, from which she does her best to keep up The Virtues That Made England Great...
...Clever people," observes Miss Morrow, "were inclined to be fond of spiteful gossip and intrigue...
...just as the blind sometimes develop an extraordinary sense of smell and touch, Miss Morrow's plainness seemed to have increased her powers of observation...
...Miss Morrow's sagacity, for example, is obviously in direct proportion to her plainness...
...That E.P...
...Whether Miss Pym has used Miss Morrow as an alter ego I cannot say, but I do know that, unlike at least some of the women, the men of Crampton Hodnet all emerge as frivolous...
...Cleveland...
...Upon these two mismatches the novel turns, with Miss Morrow even receiving a half-hearted proposal from Mr...
...So what's a reviewer to do...
...That's at best...
...The other major attachment in the book occurs between a dreamy young pupil, Barbara Bird, who falls in love with her tutor, Francis Cleveland, a don at Randolph College who has the added misfortune of being Miss Doggett's nephew...
...Great expectations are dashed, and the homey drawing room that the romantics originally saw as repressive grows in allure as the storybook examples of love reveal little substance behind them...
...Miss Pym's clergyman is given to make "curately jokes...
...Latimer (which she turns down...
...For her the mythological village becomes a symbol: "The whole affair seemed a little suspicious∔rather Crampton Hodnet was how she put it to herself...
...Latimer to miss evensong, he tells the vicar's wife a preposterous story about visiting a fellow cleric at a place called Cramp-ton Hodnet...
...Everyone compares her to Jane Austen...
...If anything, she seems rather more fond of people once she has assessed their weak spots...
...Though Francis has made several generations of women swoon with his recitations of poetry, Miss Morrow correctly sees him as something of a harmless old bore...
...Indeed, it is perhaps the only thing that is being done all over the world every day that is still unique...
...and by and large one learns the quirks of all the others, most of them harmless, all of them human...
...Oh, yes, distinctly Crampton Hodnet...
...Regarding my own discovery of the British novelist Barbara Pym, it has been all the more maddening to know far better than these same friends and acquaintances just how much they would benefit from this discovery, if only they would try it...
...In the process almost everyone in the book becomes involved in everyone else's business, and vicious rumors are circulated masked as expressions of concern...
...Francis Cleveland occupies himself with a volume about one of his ancestors, which he has been working on for the past twenty-five years...
...Originally written during the Second World War, the manuscript lay dormant for about four decades because the author considered it somehow "dated...
...Miss Morrow is shocked, first by the vision of a cleric telling a lie, more so that it wasn't even a decent lie...
...Clever or no, the romances take their toll on the involved, as each would-be lover finds his experience not quite what had been imagined and certainly not what his relatives were inclined to believe...
...The story gets going when the new curate in town, Mr...
...In a world that holds out the choice of laughing at or cursing our fates, the woman who can write these words has chosen the wiser∔and far more entertaining∔of the two...
...At best, with Francis Cleveland, they are people of "a comfortable, easy occupation" who don't bother other people too much...
...When the two quite innocently get lost coming home from a fair, causing Mr...
...most of all over the circus, and what separates Miss Pym from the rest is that she does not let an accurate perception of human nature degenerate into contempt for human beings...
...Mother, of course, has a point...
...Whatever you do," said my mother, "don't compare her to Jane Austen...
...Crampton Hodnet is the latest addition to the Pym canon, published earlier this year, little more than five years after her death...
...Set in the North Oxford of the 1930s, the book opens with a tea party given by Miss Dogget, an 80-year-old spinster whose "chief work in life was interfering in other people's business and imposing her strong personality on those who were weaker than herself...
...Latimer, takes a room at Leamington Lodge, seeking respite from the unwanted attentions of innumerable women, attentions he deems unsuitable for his calling...
...For one thing, Miss Pym's novels are populated by much the same characters found in Miss Austen: determined old busybodies, aging dons getWilliam McGurn is editorial page features editor of the Wall Street Journal/Europe and a European editor of The American Spectator...
...But it's not hard to see why the ghost of Jane Austen has been invoked so frequently...
...Nor, having learned this, could one imagine being happily married to Barbara Bird...
...As behind all farce, however, there is the hard edge of sadness...
...The English drawing room is thus as good a place for the study of the human animal as any...
...Dutton chose to go ahead and publish it is a sign that even in the days when Thin Thighs in Thirty Days competes with Eat to Win for the top of the best-seller list, the law of averages occasionally works to our advantage...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
