Verse

...This mild rebellion against the wishes of her dead parents involves Mildred in the lives of Father Julian Malory, his sister Winifred, and their boarder, Mrs...

...Acknowledging that "life bruises one," Wilmet Forsyth, for example, elevates her own life "in a glass of blessings," (1958) and looks forward to dinner with "Sybil and Arnold, a happy and suitable ending to a good day...

...She enters into a cycle of despair, suffering migraines and sleeping fitfully...

...But celebration will, in fact, occur, if only with a cup of tea and a "comfortable chat about crematoria...

...But by continuing to carry out the ritual duties expected of her role, she restores herself: ' " I wanted some little books suitable for conf'trmation candidates,' said Jane in a surprisingly f'Lrm and thoughtful tone...

...Many of the authors of the new crop of Vietnam books, like at least some of the producers of the current public television series on the war, have a deep, passionate interest in the Vietnam war itself...

...The diminutive scale of English village life with the humdrum experiences of spinsters, rectors, and vicars' wives appears to camouflage any serious definition o'f the human condition...

...But ultimately, the characters in the situational microcosm of Pym's country village neither escape nor endure their experience...

...But she exercises a firm sense of choice, clarified for her through simple domestic ritual: "As I moved about the kitchen getting china and cutlery, I thought, not for the first time, how pleasant it was to be living a l o n e . . . I might be going to have a 'full life' after all...

...I I I ally said...

...A collector of Victoriana, she admits to insulating herself against disagreeable realities: "Life is only tolerable if one takes a romantic view of i t . . . And yet it's wicked, really, when there's all this misery and that sort of thing, but one feels so helpless--I mean, what can one do ?" Approaching fifty, Leonora rejects a wealthy antique dealer, Humphrey Boyce, in favor of his twenty-four-yearold bisexual nephew, James, whom she loses to a malicious homosexual...

...Natural ceremonies must be preserved if one is to live fully in the present...

...The gerontologist's mother-inlaw in A Few Green Leaves finds more comfort participating in parish coffees than by adhering to diet charts and exercise schedules...

...But one must also admit that Pym's fiction shares in the existential temper of the modern novel...

...Until now, Leonora has offered her little comfort...

...In No Fond Return of Love (1961), she acknowledged both the novelist and the sociologist for perceiving those moments which are "very near to the heart of reality...

...Planning such a day "made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change...

...The entire war was an ill-conceived effort to preserve a pro-Western stronghold in southern Vietnam even after Communist-led independence forces defeated French colonial armies...

...Rather, they become more human by trying to live with it, affirming their lot in private ritualized gestures or formal ceremonies...

...Pym keeps faith with life itself, even its trivialities...

...Today's battlefield is no longer the jungles and paddy fields of Vietnam...

...The battle today is for the hearts and minds of the American public...

...John Spragons0 Jr...

...Even within the church, Pym's characters are left to discover their own rites of affirmation...

...I am utterly alone, she thought...

...For example, the social worker assigned to Marcia Ivory (Quartet in Autumn) has little insight into the old woman's profound loneliness, let alone her peculiar habit of collecting, washing, and stacking discarded milk bottles...

...Stanley Karnow Viking, $20, 750 pp...

...The early novels, Some Tame Gazelle 13 January 1984:19 (1950), Excellent Women (1952), and Jane and Prudence (1953), are grounded in unquestioned values...

...Funerals, marriages, christenings "gave a kind of continuity to village life, like the seasons--the cutting and harvesting of the crops, then the new sowing and the springing up again...

...Her sense of ritual, the most important organizing principle of her fiction, reveals, in fact, the evolving complexity of her work and brings us closer to its significance...

...In this, Saigon fundamentally contradicted the provisions of that peace agreement, which recognized the southern revolutionaries and confh'ro, ed that the division of Vietnam into North and South was only temporary...

...His goal is to discover the ruins of a deserted medieval village in the woods of Oxfordshire...

...Before her death in 1980, Pym resumed her career with Quartet in Autumn (1977), The Sweet Dove Died (1978), and A Few Green Leaves (1980...

...Even though Catherine Oliphant in Less Than Angels (1955) and Rupert Stonebird in An Unsuitable Attachment (1963) want to return to church, it offers little for them except the comfort of nostalgia...

...At the office retirement party for herself and Marcia Ivory, the host does not even know what their jobs were, only that he has no reason to replace them...

...According to Pym, the novelist who involves the emotions of readers in the rhythm of everyday living invites their participation in the very continuity of being...

...Pym notes that Alaric Lydgate, one o f the many anthropologists throughout her novels, "often avoided looking into peoples' eyes when he spoke to them, fearful of what he might see there, for life was very terrible whatever sort of front one might put on it...

...Letty's picnic is thus an affirmarion of life, a free act of faith...

...My sister Daphne made a gooseling tart . . . ?' Could that possibly be of interest to readers of the next century...

...Commonweal: 20 Later, she humiliates herself further by sobbing uncontrollably in front of Meg, a younger friend who has been tormented in her love for a homosexual man...

...Pym's essential questions are further disguised by the tone of high comedy, for her characters are often ambivalent about learning the true meaning of their lives...

...But her ten novels, now available in England and the United States, are embraced, unfortunately, as well-crafted entertainments when, indeed, they share affinities with the existentialist mood of modern fiction...

...But unknown to James, Leonora does experience disintegration...

...But tWo later heroines, Letty Crowe in Quartet in Autumn and Leonora Eyre in The Sweet Dove Died do encounter "nothingness" and the' 'horror of being...

...Her articles have appeared in Cross Currents, Modern Fiction Studies, Southern Studies, and Commonweal...

...At home her mother would be laying the breakfast and later her aunt would creep down to see if she had done it correctly...

...Tom Dagnall, the village vicar in A Few Green Leaves, is particularly aware of historic time...

...Other characters, too, relieve their isolation by discovering their own private ceremonies, for contemporary life, according to Pym's later fiction, is very unfestive...

...No, thank you, I was just looking around,' was what one USUELEANOR B. WYMARD is a professor of English at Carlow College in Pittsburgh...

...It ended only after Congress balked at paying the tab for the Saigon government -a regime which continued to insist it was the sole government of a separate southern state even after the 1973 Paris agreeII ment was signed...

...Mary's Church, "on the wrong side of Victoria Station," because it is relatively "High...

...Returning that night to her eighty-one-year-old landlady, Letty is renewed with another cup of tea: "There was something to be said for tea and a comfortable chat about crematoria...

...In Excellent Women, Mildred Lathbury, the "just over thirty" unmar, tied daughter of a country clergyman, is drawn to worship at St...

...In Pym's view of the modern world, only the resiliency of human nature generates the rebirth of a dead soul...

...which should have been held in 1956...

...The quartet in autumn are lonely government clerks-Letty, Marcia, Norman and Edwin-who have worked together many years in an airless London office, but have shared very little of themselves...

...officials in Saigon beat an ignominious retreat from the embassy roof as revolutionary tanks roiled virtually unopposed toward the capital of the defunct southern regime...

...In an early novel, Jane and Prudence (1953), Jane Cleveland, a vicar's wife, ruminates, for example, that "one's life followed ~i- kind of pattern, with the same things cropping up again and again, but it seemed to [her], floundering among the books, that the question was not one that "could be lightly dismissed now...

...Her first heroine, Belinda Bede in Some T.ame Gazelle only suggests unspoken depths by ruminating, " I f only one could clear out one's mind and heartas ruthlessly as one did one's wardrobe...

...The quartet hesitantly tries to redefine itself when Norman and Edwin plan a reunion luncheon...

...Just looking round the Anglican Church, from one extreme to the other, perhaps climbing higher and higher, peeping over the top to have a look at Rome on the other side, and then quickly drawing back...

...It has been more than eight years since the last U.S...

...I n comparison to the present, the past is rich with natural rituals which provide assurance and connection...

...But, even though Leonora grows in sympathy and sensitivity, Pym still does not claim too much for her...

...Similar to Jane, Pym's characters consistently surprise themselves with questions from which they tentatively withdraw, as if to probe them would almost mean too much...

...But Emma Howick, the social anthropologist in Pym's last novel, A Few Green Leaves, gradually forsakes accumulating data on the "Social Patterns of the West Oxfordshire Community" to write a novel using the same setting...

...The American war in that Southeast Asian land was declared ended, on paper, more than a decade ago...

...Although Pym's early characters are not moved to profound meditation, they experience the joy of making quiet decisions about their own lives in the presence of ordinary human reality...

...Mildred has more opportunities than most of the' 'excellent women" of the parish to involve herself with men and the possibility of marriage...

...Yet, for Pym, style is a way of coping with modem pressures, even if it cannot resolve them...

...After her retirement, Letty Crowe tries "to discover what church-going held for people, apart from habit and convention, wondering if it would hold anything for her and if so what form this would take...

...To rescue herself from emotional deprivation, Letty must find significant forms and ceremonies...

...When facing retirement, Letty awakens from a dream about her youth: "All gone, that time, those p e o p l e . . . [she] lay for some time meditating on the strangeness of life slipping away like this...

...Her canon evolves toward the certainty that an individual can rescue herself from chaos, can affirm herself in a leap of faith which springs from a willingness to confront the terms of her own life...

...Since "we all came to the same thing in the end--dust and/or ashes, however you liked to think of it," it is the writer-neither the anthropologist nor the historian--who can preserve " a few green leaves" for future generations...

...VIETNAM A History...

...At the end of the novel, she looks forward to a day in the country with Edwin, Norman, and Marjorie, her only sustaining friend...

...A young anthropology student, Deidre Swan, in Less Than Angels (1956), draws insight for us:"Yes, I suppose it's comforting to see people going about their humdrum business...

...Moreover, they celebrate themselves in ceremonies which have private, sometimes communal, significance...

...O NE NEVER HEARS the actual sound of terror in Pym's early novels...

...Her first crisis occurs in a Knightsbridge tearoom where she is conscious of belonging "with the sad jewelery and the old woman and the air of things that had seen better days...

...Some even have an interest in the way that war affected the lands and peoples of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia...

...shallow refinements, at the beginning of the novel, now deepen into a kind of courage...

...While her characters do not confront irrevocable decisions, they do shape their lives through very personal choices...

...With this sensation of nothingness she entered the library...

...It is the pages of books and the screens of our televisions...

...A1legra Gray, who has romantic designs on the unmarried rector...

...CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF ORDER & CEREMONY Secular faith of Barbara Pym ELEANOR B. WYMARD M OST CRITICS of Barbara Pym call attention to the fact that after having written six successful novels between 1950 and 1961, her seventh, An Unsuitable Attachment, was rejected by publishers in 1963...

...One of Pym's most complex heroines, Leonora Eyre (A Sweet Dove Died) is unappealingly selfish and snobbish...

...From this perspective, stated by Catherine Oliphant in Less Than Angels (1955), Pym thus accentuates the commonplace, even the banal...

...That life which Catherine Oliphant describes as "comic and sad and indefinite--dull, sometimes, but seldom really tragic or deliriously happy, except when one's very young...

...Jane Cleveland, now forty-one and a former English tutor at Oxford, had once "taken great pleasure in imagining herself as a clergyman's w i f e . . , but she has been quickly disillusioned...

...Shortly after, when Marcia, the most eccentric of the group, dies, the three survivors follow her to the crematorium and afterward share their second meal...

...Life, for Pym, is a social enterprise...

...The remaining trio in Quartet in Autumn finds redemption in the hope of Letty's picnic, not the celebration of liturgical ritual...

...Such affirmation risks sentimentality, for !t may seem that Pym is yearning for more simple times...

...After all, the mode of The Sweet Dove Died is essentially ironic...

...Such ordinary characters are at home in the literary imagination of Barbara Pym...

...T HE ACT OF WRITING is itself a ceremonial act for Pym...

...Not too High, you k n o w ' . . . By now it was almost teatime, [but] she would go without [it] as a kind of penance for all the times she had failed as a vicar's wife...

...During these two crises, Leonora creates new meaning for herself, however, by relinquishing her false pride and dignity...

...If Pym's characters are in search of order and ceremony, it is ironic, indeed, that the Anglican Church, so pervasive in her novels, is never the source of inspiration for renewing one's faith...

...Preoccupied with local history, he keeps a record of his own dally life: "What was he to write about the events of the morning...

...On the first Sunday after Easter, he also rallies the villagers to participate in a walk in the park and the woods surrounding the ancient manor and mausoleum on the fringe of town, a variation on an annual rite dating from the seventeenth century...

...To minimize this tone of her high comedy would be to deny the core of Pym's vision...

...James feels that Leonora would have been able to deal with his relationship with Ned had she the ability to lose her perfect control and "been just a little angry...

...I IIIIHI Jill II Books: VIETNAM, THE BATTLE REJOINED I T HE BATTLES of Vietnam are being fought once again...

...Among the "cast off crusts, the ruined cream cakes and the cigarette ends," Leonora feels "debased, diminished, crushed and trodden into the ground, indeed brought to a certain point of dilapidation...

...Pym was rescued from oblivion only when Philip Larkin and David Cecil named her, in a 1975 anniversary issue of the Times Literary Supplement, as the most underrated English novelist of the twentieth century...

...Attending Stations of the Cross, she hears the litany, "'From pain to pain, from woe to woe' . . . but Letty's thoughts had been on herself and how she should arrange the rest of her life...

...Nonetheless, she grows in personal identity to the point of being able to confide in her husband: "We can only go blundering along in that state of life unto which it shall please God to call u s . . . I was going to be such a splendid clergyman's wife when I married you, but somehow it hasn't turned out like The Daisy Chain or The Lost Chronicles of Barset...

...And they would probably go on doing this all of their lives...

...Pym's essential subject is thus the incommunicable uniqueness of each ordinary person: "After all, life was like t h a t . . , for most of us [life is] the small unpleasantness rather than the great tragedies, the little useless languages rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction...

...Even in a world of structured social effort, the individual is more isolated than ever...

...But the new 13 January 1984:21...

...At this point, Letty experiences utter helplessness: " I t seemed t o Letty that what cannot now be justified has perhaps never existed, and it gave her the feeling that she and Marcia had been swept away as if they had never been...

...At first, the world of Barbara Pym is strangely insular...

...Pym insists that rituals preserve one from experiencing chaos, but such actions must spring from the ability of the character to assent to the realities of her own existence...

...It began when the United States undermined the 1954 Geneva Accords which ended the French war, temporarily dividing the country pending national elections, I I Illl I WITHOUT HONOR DEFEAT IN VIETNAM AND CAMBOI]IA Arnold R. Isues Johns Hopkins, $19.95, $$9 pp...