Pym and Her Poets
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing PYM AND HER POETS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Barbara Pym's novels have attracted many loyal readers since they began to appear in the early 1950s. Her bittersweet comedies of...
...Perhaps I do, but I still mind...
...You might dismiss such women as repressed, or wax indignant on their behalf, but the author reveled in what she called "the richness" available to their circumscribed lives...
...Her autobiography, a collection of diaries and letters titled A Very Private Eye, came out in 1984...
...Yet every one of her plots brings on an attractive male who rebuffs the heroine without noticing her interest in him...
...Men "respect and esteem" her because she is pleasant, capable, self-effacing, and always valuable in handling an emergency—yet without fail they choose to fall in love with someone less practical, more decorative...
...I suspect the tragedy in Pym's makeup was that she fell for the sort of witty, good looking man who simply did not find her sexually attractive...
...From the title to the portrait of plucky Barbara laughing at her own blunders while patiently coming to terms with adversity, this biography reads as if it were the ultimate Pym novel...
...Her books dropped out of print...
...They taught her the secret of writing about suffering with humorous understanding...
...Delafield and Marjorie Sharpe, whose mild social comedies seemed "irrelevant" amid the sexual frankness of the swinging '60s...
...It remains for a future biographer to discover how Barbara Pym dealt with the rough edges of her own life...
...Pym knew how to practice the cheerful resignation she described...
...O let him be gone and no more hankering for this, second rate as it is...
...No less significant, I would argue, are the recurrent themes of those 17th-century poets whose stanzas Pym's heroines turn to in moments of stress: Herbert, Vaughan, Milton, and Marvell...
...But to insist that Pym's fiction possesses this redemptive power will not strike her devotees as hyperbolic...
...each one constituted what she termed A n Unsuitable Attachment (another of her titles...
...She never sneers—even at herself...
...Similarly, Philip Larkin taught her to regard with compassion those who are so difficult as to be unlikable—hence the poignancy of her later books...
...This undercurrent of emotion continually threatens to upset the comic tone...
...Only close friends sensed the depth of her hurt, and few realized that she continued to develop plots and characters, although with no real hope of a comeback...
...A recurrence of cancer killed her early in 1980, shortly before the release of her ninth novel...
...If it seems like "a lot to ask," it is nevertheless what all readers secretly hope for...
...Pym was the only living novelist to be named twice—by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil...
...it's a study of the pain of being single, the unconscious hurt the world regards as this state's natural clothing...
...Pym has carefully studied the humorous effects of such satiric masters as Evelyn Waugh, Ivy Compton-Burnett and the Aldous Huxley of Crome Yellow...
...time and again one senses not only that Mildred is suffering, but that nobody can see why she shouldn't suffer, like a Victorian cabhorse...
...Holt does cast light on the quirky aspects of Pym's personality, including her role playing...
...Another of Pym's odd activities was making up "sagas"— imaginary tales woven around people she observed but did not know personally...
...The numerous anthropologists, including the unforgettable "Miss Clovis" with "hair like a dog," came from the stories she concocted while working at Africa...
...Throughout the '80s, a new Pym novel was issued every few years...
...Vindication came in 1977...
...Holt remarks that John Betjeman "influenced her more than any novelist...
...Critics hailed it as moving and topical, and wondered how she could have fallen into neglect...
...Pym quietly protested, then stoically decided to accept the verdict...
...Thischaracter generally lives in slightly "reduced" circumstances and volunteers at a genteel association to aid "distressed gentlewomen," or works as a research assistant, or perhaps merely helps plan bazaars in some parish...
...Although letters and memoirs are introduced in evidence, suspicion lingers...
...Certainly the wise and amused woman it presents sounds more like the person one might imagine the author of the fiction to be than the unhappy diarist...
...Her values come from a completely different source, and her most profound models are all poets...
...It was immediately accepted...
...Admirers found this disquieting, for it suggested that Pym's philosophy failed to work...
...Emboldened by this, she sent a recently completed manuscript to Macmillan...
...Her bittersweet comedies of manners chronicle the ordinary pleasures and frustrations of educated, middle-class women and men...
...Eventually Harvey became a good friend...
...Holt insists that Pym's penchant for unsuitable men sprang from her preference for romance over reality...
...Pym enjoyed the irony of the reversal, although not for long...
...This gave her the courage to tag after a handsome fellow undergraduate, whom she nicknamed Lorenzo prior to discovering his name was Henry Harvey, and led to an unsatisfactory affair that would be the model for several of the funnier romantic episodes in her novels...
...The story ? f four fello w office workers on the verge of mandatory retirement, Quartet in Autumn deals with the problems of aging in a youth-oriented society...
...In 1963, after a decade of success writing popular fiction, her longtime editors at Jonathan Cape pronounced her books pass...
...Literary biographies must fulfill a twofold purpose: They have to illuminate the craft that went into a writer's work, and they have to provide insight into the private person...
...This remained a preoccupation and was frequently the source of incidents and characters in her writing...
...It's hard to be sure, since everything in her background trained her to deprecate her own feelings, just as she deprecated her writing abilities (of two novelistic self-portraits, one pens serials for women's magazines, the other writes formula fiction for the lending library trade...
...Readers of No Fond Return of Love (1961) will be fascinated to learn that Dulcie Mainwarning's obsessive research into the life and haunts of a handsome editor is based on a true escapade of her author's...
...Invariably they are citizens of close-knit communities: English villages or university towns, learned societies or AngloCatholic parishes...
...What she really enjoyed—like Prudence, the heroine whom she often said that she resembled—was being in love...
...A friend] says I enjoy wallowing in emotion...
...Harvey concurs, adding that Pym's nature was "without sensuality...
...Echoing her favorite poet, George Herbert, she felt that their very deprivations made them more inclined to notice and appreciate tiny details and simple comforts, and to laugh sympathetically at the foibles of human relationships—especially those between the sexes...
...Holt has worked on her friend's writings for so long that she has captured the essence of her style...
...She left behind a number of manuscripts, and since her revived popularity showed no signs of abating, Holt—the author's executor, and former colleague and friend from Africa— decided to prepare them for publication...
...When Harvey threw her over for a Finnish girl, Barbara created a Scandinavian persona for herself, Vikki Olaf son, and set off for Poland to be a governess—on the eve of World War II...
...A Lot to Ask may have been written to balance the picture...
...That explains how she avoids so artfully both the Scylla of comic triviality and the Charybdis of brittle irony...
...I know it is unfashionable to suggest that a novelist could help us lead saner lives, or teach us contentment...
...At Oxford she invented an alter ego, Sandra, who was frivolous and "fast" with boys...
...Macmillan brought out another of her unpublished works, and Cape began to reprint the novels whose rights they held...
...Philip Larkin acutely perceived that Excellent Women, often misread as a light comedy, is in fact "full of a harsh kind of suffering...
...Her typical heroine, still young but already verging on spinsterhood, belongs to a breed Pym designated Excellent Women (the title of her second novel...
...She concentrated on her career as an assistant editor for Africa, the anthropological journal put out by London's International African Institute, and stopped referring to herself as a writer...
...Holt masterfully captures the surface of her friend's manner by concentrating on the control that made her a novelist...
...In one respect, Pym was even unluckier than most of them...
...Or, "Fortunately all the fury and bitterness I sometimes feel has stayed hidden inside me and R. doesn't—perhaps never will—know...
...The men she fell in love with were married, homosexual or uninterested...
...However, she does not share their supercilious nastiness...
...Hazel Holt's new biography, A Lot to Ask (Dutton, 308 pp., $19.95), explains that the publishing industry had classed her with "women's writers" like Angela Thirkell, E.M...
...Too much genuine anguish breaks through the sentimental facade in the diaries...
...The Times Literary Supplement ran a feature that asked prominent authors to select their candidate for "the most underrated writer of the century...
...Maybe so, but I'm not convinced on this point and think Holt has missed the target...
...Her spinsters of Pimlico Flats, where the Victorian bric-a-brac inherited from their father's vicarage betrays the cooling embers of family pride, can also be found in the late poet laureate's ballads of British social decay...
...The journal entries, in particular, exhibited naked anguish and confusion over these affairs, untempered by the ameliorating humor or sense of perspective expressed in the novels...
...Overnight, she found herself acclaimed as a celebrity...
...he was the last person to visit her before she died...
...It covered her life from her days as a student at Oxford to the last note she wrote, and revealed just how closely her heroines' lives had been modeled on her own...
Vol. 74 • May 1991 • No. 6
