May 13, 2021
The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, by Paula Byrne
I…don’t like big books. They’re heavy to hold, don’t fit in my purse, and I’ve just got no time for that, for the most part. It just doesn’t groove with the pace of my life, and so at 612 pages, I was intimidated by The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, Paula Byrne’s biography of novelist, the first since a 1990 biography by Pym’s friend and literary executor Hazel Holt which might have revealed fewer insights that it could have out of respect for Pym herself, who’d died of cancer in 1980.
But reader, I read it in two days. Granted, these were two days I’d set aside especially for it, turning off my wifi and accompanying social media so all my attention could be focussed on the task at hand, which was giving my poor wrists the support they needed to hold Byrne’s biography up to my eyes. But it helped that Byrne had divided her book into short and action-packed chapters in the style of 18th century novels like Moll Flanders, chapters with titles such as “In which our Heroine is born in Oswestry,” “In which Miss Pym returns to Oxford,” and so on to “In which our Heroine goes to Germany for the third time and sleeps with her Nazi.”
TURN BACK, BARBARA! was what the residents of my household took to shouting as I kept them abreast of developments in the narrative, such as when Barbara was having an affair with her friend’s father, various gay men, her roommate’s estranged husband, and yes, a literal Nazi. Barbara Pym was an extraordinary person, a brilliant novelist, and had comically terrible judgment when it came to men (and 1930s’ political regimes). Although it occurs to me that her terrible judgment may have been what made her such a wonderful novelist, her ability to imagine her characters into the impossible situations she’d often encountered herself. She took the tragedies (and absurdities) of her own life and spun them into literary (and comic) gold.
Barbara Pym was a fascinating woman—a student at Oxford in the 1930s, she was an enthusiastic participant in sexual relationships, and imagined herself into all kinds of romantic dramas, her particular obsession with one lover occupying her for the rest of her life. She was very drawn to Germany in the 1930s, displaying that typical judgment I’ve always mentioned, but this did not persist into wartime, where she would serve with the WRENs in Naples. After the war, she was hired as an editor for an academic journal in anthropology, which served as fodder for her work (oh my gosh, her treatment of office dynamics and whose job it is to put the kettle on and how is SO SPOT ON) but also paid her a pittance. Being a novelist was most fundamental to her identity out of everything else she did—her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, was published in 1950. She’d been working on the novel since her Oxford days.
Throughout the 1950s, she published five books, her sixth appearing in 1961. And after this, her new work was not accepted by her publisher, nor by any another. The fashions were changing, and so was the publishing industry (everyone thought the industry was just as dire then as they have ever since), and Pym’s understated humour and wry old-fashioned sensibility had not kept up to date, it was said. So she would toil in the wilderness, encouraged by her excellent friend Philip Larkin, and these years were hard ones for her—money was a struggle, she was depressed by romantic relationships that didn’t pan out, she encountered health struggles, and felt left behind by the literary scene.
And then everything turned around—in 1977, Pym was mentioned (twice!) in a Times Literary Supplement list of underrated writers. All of a sudden, the newspapers and radio were calling. Her publisher wanted to put her back into print, she relished in rejecting them this time, new works coming out with MacMillan, her earlier books re-released. Her next novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize. Pym would be celebrated before her death at the age of 66, which gives this life the happy ending her biography’s reader longs for. The kind of triumph that doesn’t always happen in life itself, and seems more fitting for a novel instead (but then we’d call the conclusion a little bit pat).
Byrne refreshes one’s perception of Pym in this biography, whose title and form is entirely suited to a life that wasn’t quiet at all, and which pushed the margins in all kinds of ways. She also shows the way that Pym’s work was a reflection of its times, and changed along with the fashions, responding to the world around her, even though many of her preoccupations (spinsters and curates especially) remained the same.
June 2, 2013
Victoria Sponge for Barbara Pym
I successfully baked a Victoria Sponge cake in honour of the Barbara Pym centenary (and because I feel like eating one). Recipe from Nigella’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess, with fresh Ontario strawberries inside. Here’s hoping it tastes as good as it looks. And happy birthday, Miss Pym!
June 2, 2013
Reading Barbara Pym on her Centenary
I have nearly all of Barbara Pym’s novels on my shelf, the bulk of which I obtained when a contents sale was held at a house around the corner and I pretty much cleaned out the library. And this is how it is with Barbara Pym novels–it usually takes death for a reader to finally part with them. Though they also turn up at used book sales from time to time (probably after a death as well), which is how I first encountered Excellent Women, perhaps Pym’s best-known novel. I’d heard of Pym from Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, Maureen Corrigan’s Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading and also from this wonderful piece on the CBC on the Barbara Pym Society, which I joined shortly after becoming a Pym convert. It was Excellent Women that fast turned me into one too, and no wonder, I discovered, over the past few days as I read the book again.
It’s wonderful. I could see how encountering Pym first through some of her other novels might be a less delightful experience, one not truly appreciated until one understands the nature of the Pymmian universe. But Excellent Women, as subtle and small as her other books, is so absolutely funny, its goodness immediately graspable. As ever, the delicious gap because what is written on the page and the reader’s apprehension of the true situation. It’s the story of Mildred Lathbury, spinster daughter of a clergyman whose life changes with the arrival of new neighbours Rocky and Helena Napier, plus a clergyman’s widow who steals the heart of the vicar whom everyone had assumed that Mildred was in love with.
And the lines: “A little grey woman… brewing coffee in the ruins.” The austerity of 1950s’ England is not at the novel’s forefront, but instead a shadow in the background with references to bombed-out buildings, ration books, and bad food. But ordinary life goes on anyway, church services conducted in the half of the church that was not destroyed in the war, which gives the congregation a heightened intimacy.
And the vicar with his plaintive call: “May I come up? I can hear the attractive rattle of tea things. I hope I’m not too late.” Oh, so much tea. “Perhaps there can be too much making cups of tea, I thought, as I watched Miss Statham filling the heavy teapot. We had all had our supper, or were supposed to have had it, and were met together to discuss the arrangements for the Christmas bazaar. Did we really need a cup of tea? I even said as much to Miss Statham and she looked at me with a hurt, almost angry look. ‘Do we need tea?’ she echoed. ‘But Miss Lathbury…’ She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realize that my question had struck at something deep and fundamental. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.”
There are so many landslides in this tidy book, whose whole world is turned inside out by its final page. Most aren’t the landslides you’d notice and it doesn’t end with a wedding (though a further glimpse of these characters in another Pym novel reveals that one will come about eventually!!!), but more with a change in consciousness, the main character’s heightened awareness of her place in the world. And it’s a funny little world too, quintessentially English, rattling tea things and all. How I adore it, absolutely.
This past week, I also reread A Glass of Blessings, which is more subtle and infused with a touch of melancholy in spite of its delights. So many musings on a furniture storage facility–such a curious book. A bored and idle married woman fancies herself the object of another man’s affections, though he turns out to be gay (which is as expressly stated as you’d imagine for a book published in 1958). Pym is truly the master of the unrequited love narrative.
I do look forward to much Pym rereading this summer. I’ve read most of her books in a pleasurable blur, and welcome the opportunity to think deeper about them. I also look forward to baking a victoria sponge cake this afternoon in celebration of her centenary. It’s either bake a cake or have a baby, and the latter doesn’t appear to be happening yet.
March 30, 2012
A Barbara Pym kind of morning
It’s all been very Pymmian, my experience of membership in the Barbara Pym Society. That I’d join a society whose membership includes attendance at events that I never, ever go to, for one. But the Pymmishness really began with a handwritten letter I received in the post about two years ago from a fellow Pymmite who was rallying Ontario members of the society to get together. The very best thing was that the letter writer’s name seemed familiar, and I realized that she was a writer whose essay I’d noted on this very blog about 3 years previously and we’d even had a brief email correspondence. Anyway, we were back in touch and arranged a Barbara Pym tea at my house later that summer. It was a delightful get-together and we all fell in love immediately, and everything was perfect except that I’d put out a ton of food and everybody had already had lunch before their arrival. Further social awkwardness ensued when afterwards a gift was put in the post for Harriet which never arrived. I didn’t want to say anything because perhaps there hadn’t been a gift after all, but then months later, there was an enquiry as to whether I’d received it, and I felt terrible, because all that time they’d been thinking that I was a type of person who didn’t send thank-you notes! Not to mention that the present had disappeared off the face of the earth. Oh, the perils of the postal system…
Anyway, last weekend, my friend Gloria called me (and it’s true that Barbara Pymmites and my mom are the only people who call me ever) to say that she and Judy were getting together this week, and she wondered if I could come along. At the time, I was facing a week of municipal labour unrest which meant no organized activities for my toddler, so I was very happy to accept. We drove out to the suburbs this morning with a blueberry cake in tow, and arrived only a few minutes late. It turned out that that the long-lost present had been found in the post office a few months ago, and so Harriet finally got to unwrap it– a gingham dress bought much too big so that 18 mos later, it fits perfectly. They also gave her a cowboy hat, which I can’t quite believe she didn’t own already.
The table was spread with just as many lovely things as I’d prepared back in 2010, except that we hadn’t had lunch before. We set to wait for the other guests to arrive… but they never did! Oh, we enjoyed ourselves, cups of tea and delicious cake and Harriet gorging on blue cheese. We enjoyed catching up again after many months, but at the back of our minds, we were concerned about where Judy and her husband had got to. The phone rang once and there was nobody there, which only served to up the urgency. We were all very polite and hid the panic, and poured more cups of tea, for what else can you do?
Finally, it was time for Harriet and I to get back to the city, and just as we were leaving, Judy rang. She and her husband had been caught in traffic all morning and finally decided to pack it in and turn around and go back home. Which was too bad, her waste of a morning and that we’d missed her, but we were all really thinking that our gathering had just narrowly escaped a calamity, worst-case scenarios passing before our eyes. We were all a little giddy as we bid our final good-byes.
So we will do it again soon, with Judy this time, and maybe we’ll all finally get it right but it’s funny how much these social situations are precisely the stuff of Pym, the excellentness of the women in particular, of course– Judy is even a vicar’s wife. That there is a timelessness to Pym’s grasp of human dynamics, their intricacies and awkwardnesses. And it’s unfortunate for those of us who have to live it but so fortunate for those of us who get to read it: these kinds of stories will never go out of style.
July 14, 2011
Barbara Pym for afters
We’ve invented a new dessert! Or rather, we’ve re-christened a very familiar one. This all came about because Harriet had taken to walking around the house screaming, “Barbara Pym!” Which is a bit weird, because Harriet and I don’t talk about Barbara Pym a lot, but I must talk about her to other people enough that the name is known (and I shouldn’t be surprised– Harriet has had her photo in the Barbara Pym Society newsletter after all).
One night a few weeks back, when Barbara Pym mania was at its height, Harriet was coerced into her chair at the table with the promise that we were going to be eating Barbara Pym for dessert. Dessert turned out to be berries with ice cream, which has since become the Barbara Pym that we eat almost daily. Splendid local raspberries tonight with maple ice cream made this particular dish of Barbara Pym delightful.
Here is a photo of the world’s dirtiest child devouring hers, having just completed her first course, which was mostly ketchup.
April 28, 2011
Barbara Pym Barbara Pym Barbara Pym!
I don’t know if I ever mentioned that Harriet and I were featured in the most recent issue of Green Leaves, the official newsletter of the Barbara Pym Society, along with the other guests from our local Barbara Pym gathering back in August. Some people have to wait their whole lives to get into Green Leaves, and so it was thrilling to be a part of things at the tender age of 31.
It’s also nice that my love of all things Pym has become a bit contagious, as attested to by Melanie’s blog post and its subsequent comments. (Seriously though, try it. You’ll like it.)
And finally, a heads up to the Pym-curious in Hamilton, Ontario– a Barbara Pym night is taking place at the Westdale Library on May 25th, organized by Pymmite Judy Smith. Email me if you’re interested, and I’ll put you in touch with her. Sounds like the event is going to be fun.
Oh, and another exciting thing. After I wrote my “How to woo a Barbara Pym heroine” blog post, I complained to my husband that never once in my whole life had I gone viral. He suggested that topics such as “How to woo a Barbara Pym heroine” were perhaps the reason for my obscurity. And then ten minutes later, the post went viral (in that understated way that such posts do, but there was still a surge, links by strangers, and on The Daily Pym [yeah, baby!] and Facebook and the post was featured on Stumble-upon). See, the world is hungry for Pym. I knew it.
April 12, 2011
How to woo a Barbara Pym heroine
I am exhausted from being constantly ridiculously overwrought, so here’s a fun diversion, totally stolen from 5 Dates for the Jane Austen Superfan (via Booksin140). How do you woo a Barbara Pym heroine? It’s no simple task, because spinsters are spinsters for having kept their standards high, and nobody is more romantic. The surefire way is to become a curate, of course, but here are five less dramatic suggestions.
1) Take her to church! High or low, mass or evensong. Going over to Rome and incense. I actually understand nothing about any of this, but that I’ve read and loved each of Barbara Pym’s books anyway is a testament to her wide appeal. At church, your heroine will encounter someone distasteful, either for being sluttish and ostentatious, or mousy and pious, and afterwards (over a nice hot drink) she will regale you with amusing stories about this woman. Someone will see the two of you in deep conversation, sparking inevitable rumours (and where there’s smoke, there’s fire!).
2) Accompany her to the jumble sale, and buy her a special piece of bric-a-brac, supporting foreign missionaries or distressed gentlewomen in the process. At the very least, you’ll get a cup of tea. And then at church in days ahead, you and she can talk about what dress the Vicar’s sister is sporting, and how she must have removed it from the jumble for her own personal use.
3) Arrive at her office (at the Society of Archaeologists) and take her out for lunch at a cafeteria. She will be slightly uncomfortable eating lunch from a tray, but she will try not to show it. She is nothing if not stoic. Listen to her talk of office politics, and who got fired for failure to make a proper cup of tea. Someone will be angry at her for having not sent around her tin of biscuits. And you will wonder how an Oxford grad with an endless capacity for quoted poetry works as an assistant in an office (however scholarly), and you’ll be pleased to liberate her from this life when you make an honest woman of her.
4) Take her to the library, and sit across the table in the reading room. Fall in love to the whispery din, to the scratch-scratch of pencils, and turn of ancient pages. In this atmosphere of restraint, emotions will become heated, and love will surely bloom.
5) Don’t say a word when you encounter the caterpillar in her cauliflower cheese. Ever-discreetly, set it aside, and proceed with your conversation.
November 3, 2010
Two old books: Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym and Anne of Windy Poplars by LM Montgomery
Last week I read Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn as I slowly (savouringly) make my way through her books. Quartet is the book Pym published after her years in the wilderness, the fifteen years where her work was considered unpublishable and her books went out of print. Her famous redemption came about in 1977 when Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both (independently) nominated her as one of the century’s most underrated writers. Quartet was published not long after that, followed by The Sweet Dove Died, which had been written previously and was rejected and rejected and then was not anymore.
Quartet is the story of four office mates (and what they do is quite beside the point. When the women retire, their positions aren’t filled. Days mostly hinge around brewing kettles and cups of tea) who are near retirement and who, through various circumstances, have each found themselves much alone in the world. And yet the four aren’t close either, which makes the story particularly interesting: what if the people who are closest to you hardly know you at all? And what if you’re fine with that?
Pym does a wonderful job of showing the discomfort of a person rather set in her ways who is forced to face a world that is changing. Though this makes for uncomfortable reading at times– I am not sure whether or not we’re meant to empathize with Letty when she leaves her flat because a family of Nigerians have moved into the unit below. Even Letty is not proud of her uncomfortableness, and I suppose this storyline is racist, but I also think it’s an honest depiction of very human situation. It’s not so much that Pym is racist, or her story is, though the character is, but that’s kind of the point. And I’m not sure that’s a good enough reason not to read the novel anymore.
Was hoarding a diagnosis in the 1970s? Because it’s all the rage these days, of course, but Letty’s co-worker Marcia was hard at it back in the day, filling the house she’d shared with her late mother with unopened packages of nightware from Marks and Spencer, stocking the cupboards with cans, and filling her garden shed with milk bottles (just in case there’s another war, and it’s the last war, where there was no milk without bottles). Pym manages to make Marcia’s affliction mildly amusing, actually, but it’s also sad. But not so sad– this is not a sentimental book. It’s not that lonely people are funny, or that funny people are lonely, but just that lonely people are, and I think it’s an idea that’s still incredibly profound.
**
I just finished reading Anne of Windy Poplars, which I’d been meaning to do since Kate posted about it ages ago. It’s a strange novel, the fourth in the Anne series (between of the Island and House of Dreams), but it was written after all of them. I don’t think I’ve read this book in over twenty years, but I have recently read two biographies of Montgomery and so have a better idea of its context than I did the first time. That Montgomery was being pushed by her publishers to give her readers more Anne, and so a novel like this was sort of cobbled together. That she was also limited it what she could do with Anne in this in-between story, because certainly nothing too profound could happen to her that would have to be accounted for in her already-established later history.
This novel takes place over three years in which Anne and Gilbert are living apart while she is working as principal of a high school in Summerside and Gilbert is studying at medical school. Much of the novel consists of letters she writes him, and I agree with Kate that these letters like nothing else express the true depth of their relationship. (Though unlike Kate, I never thought Gilbert was a dud. Perhaps that is because to me, he will always be Jonathan Crombie).
Because not much can happen to Anne then, this is an account of what happens to the people all around her– the people whose lives she touches, the curmudgeons she brings around, the wild people she manages to tame with her charm and by her wits. Some of these stories really are a bit much. We do see an Anne who is quite self-aware at times, and funny, remarking at one point of her tendency to meddle in the lives of others. This is less a novel really than a collection of episodes, almost short stories– it’s not so unlike The Blythes are Quoted in many respects, though of course Anne is much more central to what goes on. So many of the episodes are quite familiar to me from Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel which (please forgive me, and maybe I’m wrong because I’ve not seen it for a while) might be better than the book is. Which is not to say the book is bad, of course.
I had a similar problem with this book that I had with Budge Wilson’s Before Green Gables, with Anne encountering Anne-like characters. In Windy Poplars, it’s the story of Little Elizabeth, the lonely child who lives in the forbidding house next door and dreams of forever escaping into “tomorrow”– with all her talk of fairies and poetic trees, she’s like Anne Shirley on speed, and really, how can there be two of them? The whole point of Anne, her charm, is that she’s one in the million. Diana managed to be her kindred spirit while being nothing like Anne, and truth be told that dynamic made a lot more sense to me.
About Diana, a sad note in the novel– Anne goes home to Green Gables and Diana scarcely registers. She has a new baby, and Anne remarks at one point that Diana is busy in a whole other world, and that’s the end of it, but I found it disappointing. They were kindred spirits after all! Interesting also to see Montgomery locating her story in a wider context– there are mentions of boys, including Gilbert, going out west to work on “that railroad” they’re building out there. References to Anne teaching The War of 1812, and noting how lucky they were that days of war were far behind them, which was doubly not true by 1936 when the book was published.
September 1, 2010
The world is a Pymian place
I discovered The Barbara Pym Society before I’d even discovered Barbara Pym, in 2007 when I read this wonderful article on the CBC Arts site. This article was mostly the reason I ended up reading my first Pym book last fall, which was Excellent Women (though I think I was also inspired by a reference in Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing.) And that book was the way I fell in love with Barbara Pym, and how convenient that she had her own society that I could join. They hold annual conferences in Massachusetts and Oxford, both of which are just a bit too far out of my way, but I had a dream of one day getting there, and indulging in a bit of Pym talk with like-minded individuals.
It was to my great joy that I received a letter in July from Judy, a local Pym Society member who was looking for a meet-up. Turns out there are only a few of us in Canada– one in Montreal, three in the GTA, and four in Victoria (which makes it a veritable hotbed, no?). Judy orchestrated a get-together for those of us nearby, was gracious enough to move the venue to my house (as travelling alone with Harriet is less than fun), and we were thrilled to have our third member RSVP, and were pleased that she was to bring her daughter. Because, she and her daughter had visited Barbara Pym’s cottage during a trip to England in 2009, and they even met Barbara Pym’s sister. (Pym herself died in 1980).
And truly the world is a delightful place, because this group of strangers got together and there was immediately a kinship. We ranged in age (including Harriet) from 1-85, and we entertained one another with stories of how we’d found Barbara Pym, and what she meant to us. How her work is so deceptively simple, and how she invests the ordinary with meaning. Tea was served, scones were eaten (as this was my house, after all). At this point, Harriet left the room, and then returned wearing a hat and carrying a handbag. It was 40 degrees outside and we were sweltering in spite of the fan, but even still, the time went too quick and good conversation flowed. We wondered if Pym had ever fathomed that groups such as ours’ would be discussing her work (with such passion) thirty years after her death. Having recently read her biography, I suspected probably not, but I really wish I could have told her. Someone suggested that one couldn’t channel a spirit anymore than we were doing just then, and she was probably right.
It was a wonderful gathering, and we’re going to do it again, and I think I might have been the luckiest one there because I’ve still got unread Pyms before me. The others were inspired to reread. We said goodbye with enthusiastic hugs, and after everyone had left, I opened the hostess gift that Judy had brought me, and how thrilled I was to discover (wrapped in William Morris paper, of course) a jar of Ovaltine.
The world is a Pymian place.
April 20, 2010
My video pitch for Barbara Pym
Jen Knoch’s book club is not only Keepin’ It Real, but they’re Keepin’ Toronto Reading too. I did my part for their effort, making a video pitch for Barbara Pym’s No Fond Return of Love. You can watch the video, and my series of bizarre facial expressions, here.
