The Parish of Comedy

Barbara Pym is being rediscovered for a second time, when it’s a lucky writer who gets discovered or remembered at all. Pym’s novels—comedies of manners—achieved solid if unspectacular sales and attracted consistently good reviews in the 1950s; she published six novels during this time. Then, despite this success, publisher after publisher refused to accept any more of her novels: the 1960s mantra of experimentation, existentialism and feminism had rendered Pym passé because she wrote about genteel people, church fetes, afternoon teas and tepid attempts at illicit romance. It was hardly the stirring stuff required for social revolution.

Pym’s first rediscovery occurred in 1977 when, in a Times Literary Supplement survey, both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, with no collusion, nominated Barbara Pym as the century’s most under-rated novelist. Within a fortnight, the publishers that had for seventeen years rejected the novels Pym had sent to them, now contacted her asking for any new works. Fortunately for them and for us, Pym had continued to write despite the constant blows to her confidence by the long years of repeated rejection. Larkin was one friend who constantly encouraged her to keep writing. Three more novels were quickly published to critical acclaim, one novel being short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Barbara Pym died of cancer in January 1980, aged sixty-eight, but at least for three years she enjoyed and was grateful for the belated recognition accorded to her. Then she was rediscovered again in 2005, when new editions of her works started to appear, each novel introduced by a literary figure who is a fan of Pym’s comic novels, including Sally Vickers, Jilly Cooper, John Bayley and Alexander McCall Smith. I and my bespectacled eyes are especially enjoying the attractive large print editions now available in my local library.

Pym’s novels are not pure comedies like the comedies of P.G. Wodehouse—uncorrupted by a single idea—but social comedies in which the actions and thoughts of the characters are revealed, exposing the discrepancies between words and deeds, the pettiness, the self-delusion, and the sheer silliness of human deportment, especially when unwarranted attempts are made at solemnity. Thankfully, there is no malice in any of this; Pym is a kind author. A cheerful, practical person, she made the most of her life—enjoying her administrative work at the African Institute and the modest house she shared with her sister—and it is this sense that life will mostly turn out well that makes reading her novels a refreshing experience.

In Crampton Hodnet, my favourite Pym novel, the abrasive and snobby spinster Miss Doggett never does get her just deserts and I don’t want her to—I enjoy her too much to want her to learn from her errors and change her ways. She upbraids her lady’s companion, Miss Morrow, a sort of Elizabeth Bennet character who observes with amusement but who usually keeps her observations to herself, when in a moment of impetuous joy Miss Morrow embraces a monkey-puzzle tree:

It was a lovely morning, when even the monkey-puzzle was bathed in sunshine. She clasped a branch in her hand and stood feeling its prickliness and looking up into the dark tower of the branches. It was like being in church. And yet on a day like this, one realized that it was a living thing too and had beauty, as most living things have in some form or another. Dear monkey-puzzle, thought Miss Morrow, impulsively clasping her arms around the trunk.

“Now, Miss Morrow,” came Miss Doggett’s voice, loud and firm, “you must find some other time to indulge in your nature worship or whatever it is. You look quite ridiculous. I hope nobody saw you.”

Miss Morrow is being courted but in a desultory way by a handsome curate, Mr Latimer, whose charming comments to everyone seem to come from an interior gramophone record. Church people like him to be present, even if he would prefer to be absent, at a tedious jumble sale:

“How much longer will it last?” he asked in a low voice. “It’s five o’clock now.”

“It will last as long as you stay here,” said Miss Morrow. “Surely you can see that?”

Mr Latimer heaved a scarcely perceptible sigh. “Do you think that if a thunderbolt suddenly fell out of the sky onto this hideous embroidered tea cosy it would end then?” he asked.

“The tea cosy would be spoilt and nobody would be able to buy it, but why should the Sale of Work end?” said Miss Morrow.

“Are there no sick people I ought to visit?” asked Mr Latimer hopefully.

“There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive. It’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference, that’s all,” explained Miss Morrow.

Eventually, Mr Latimer chooses a moment when Miss Doggett is absent to propose to Miss Morrow. It’s comic disaster. Here they are at the tender moment:

“We’re neither of us young, if it comes to that. But we aren’t old yet.” His voice took on a more hopeful note. “Oh, Miss Morrow—Janie,” he burst out suddenly.

“My name isn’t Janie.”

“Well, it’s something beginning with J,” he said impatiently. It was annoying to be held up by such a triviality. What did it matter what her name was at this moment?

“It’s Jessie, if you want to know, or Jessica really,” she said, without looking up from her knitting.

“Oh, Jessica,” continued Mr Latimer, feeling a little flat by now, “couldn’t we escape out of all this together?”

Miss Morrow began to laugh. “Oh, dear,” she said, “you must excuse me, but it’s so odd to be called Jessica. I think I rather like it; it gives me dignity.”

“Well?” said Mr. Latimer, feeling now as flat as any man who has just proposed marriage and been completely ignored.

“Well what?” echoed Miss Morrow.

“I said, couldn’t we escape out of all this together?”

“Do you mean go out this evening?” she said, with a casual glance at the marble clock on the mantelpiece. “To the pictures or something?”

Also in Crampton Hodnet, Miss Doggett’s nephew, Francis Cleveland, a middle-aged don (Oxbridge don, not Mafia Don) falls in love, or thinks he falls in love—maybe he’s just bored or wants to shake his wife out of her complacent attitude towards him—with a cracker of a student, Barbara Bird. Barbara imagines she is in love with Francis but, alas for him, her love is Platonic rather than erotic. Nevertheless, the bumbling don and the confused student plan to elope to Paris where their love—a meeting of bodies in Francis’s mind, a meeting of minds in hers—can be properly consummated. But Francis, more Don Quixote than Don Juan, doesn’t know the way to Dover, he doesn’t know when the ferries to France leave, and when they arrive late and have to stay in a dingy hotel Barbara comes to her senses and bails out. Francis retreats to his wife who knew about his infatuation but she guessed that Francis was too lazy and too conventional to endanger his cosy home and easy way of life. She is right but no credit to her. She imagines she handles the marital crisis well but she does nothing other than let the inertia of their lives determine her path. When she does wonder about Francis’s interest in Barbara, she distracts herself from the troubling thoughts.

It occurred to Mrs Cleveland that Francis had been rather evasive about the whole thing, but, as it was the strawberry season and there was a great deal of jam to be made, she was really too busy to give the matter much thought, although she sometimes found herself brooding over it before she went to sleep at night. But that, as everyone knew, was the very worst time to think about anything. It was much more sensible to push all worries out of one’s mind and to play a nice little alphabet game until one went off to sleep.

Mrs Cleveland’s refusal to enter into the depths of her own life is typical of many of Pym’s characters, and this common inauthenticity is prominent among Pym’s abiding themes. One of Tolstoy’s repeated descriptors of character, especially in Anna Karenina, involves this self-diversion from difficulties, this decision to put ease before honesty: “He did not want to see, and did not see … He did not want to understand, and did not understand …” “She guessed at something which she could not tell her mother, which she did not put into words to herself. It was one of those things which one knows but which one can never speak of even to oneself …” and so on, relentlessly, throughout the book. Pym isn’t as scorching in her exposure of inauthenticity as Tolstoy, but it is still there and obvious. This self-deception is compounded by outright silliness. Much of the humour in her novels comes from the characters’ small pretensions or the emotion they waste on negligible concerns. In An Academic Question, Caro thinks her husband is having an affair and seeks consolation from Dolly, a friend. Unfortunately, Dolly can’t comfort Caro because Dolly needs comfort herself: her pet hedgehog, Maeve, a yellowy-coated critter, has died. Caro tells her that there are other hedgehogs. Dolly responds by adapting a line from Yeats: “Yes, but not my golden Maeve, the ancient Irish queen.”

Back in Crampton Hodnet, the parish Sale of Work is opened by a vague but graceful and eminent Londoner, Lady Beddoes. Her silliness is on full display, but no one minds or even notices:

If they had not been so charmed by her manner and appearance, they might have realized that she had almost given the impression that the garden party was in aid of the poor of Poland, about whom she spoke with great feeling for about ten minutes. And then, perhaps realizing that she had wandered from the point, for she had quite forgotten to refer to her written speech, she ended up by saying that there really were a lot of poor people who needed our help, especially in London—in the East End, she added, frowning a little, for London to her meant Belgravia and she had not really seen much sign of poverty there. We ought therefore to buy as many things as we could. She herself was certainly going to buy a great many things.

The Anglican Church and its parishioners provide rich opportunities for Pym to portray consistent silliness and inauthenticity. The clergy are routinely portrayed either as eccentric or as so dull that one could trace the decline in the Church’s influence in England just by studying Pym’s novels. This inanity occurs when a vicar welcomes people to a church garden party:

“Let us pray,” said the vicar in a voice that was intended to be sonorous but succeeded only in being harsh and startling. “O Lord God Almighty, look down and bless our humble endeavours and the cause for which we are working. Grant that we may be successful in our enterprise and that we may have fine weather, so that we may enjoy the fruits of the earth, which Thou in Thy mercy hast vouchsafed to us. Amen.”

But the garden party is spoiled by a storm:

A crowd of people was soon hurrying into the vicarage, stalls were covered up and tea things hastily abandoned to the fury of the downpour.

“What a pity, what a pity,” said the vicar, flapping his hands in confusion. “I’m so sorry,” he added, as if feeling that the inadequacy of his prayers was to blame for the break in the weather.

When one reads Pym’s novels one finds oneself wishing—there is a lot of this type of very English phraseology in Pym—that people got more from their faithful church involvement than they seem to get. A sense of community is there, and some small solace in distress, but little more. Routine and convention seem to have largely smothered vision and transcendence: they fuss over flower arrangements and jumble sales. I read the novels, especially Jane and Prudence and Excellent Women, and longed for an Anglican Kierkegaard, who would have at least attempted to smuggle Christianity back into the Church.

For many years, Pym was a member of the parish council of St Lawrence’s church and it caused her great distress when the decision was made to close St Lawrence’s because of debt and few attendees. She had first-hand experience of the petty concerns that overwhelmed church people and their unquestioning acquiescence to this pettiness, yet she loved the Church and grieved over its diminishing vibrancy and influence. She saw that people were seeking answers to their problems through therapy rather than sanctity; in one of her 1960s notebooks, she observed that the doctor’s office was crowded but the vicar’s office was empty.

Pym exemplifies the idea that the fairest and most incisive critic of anything is the person who loves that thing and not the person who hates it. In a rare episode of real frustration with the church, the curate Mr Latimer experiences and admits to himself—nothing inauthentic here!—a sense of suffocation in his vocation:

Yes, this was the Church of England, his flock, thought Mr Latimer, a collection of old women, widows and spinsters, and one young man not quite right in the head. These were the people among whom he was destined to spend his life. He hunched his shoulders in his surplice and shivered. The church, with its dampness and sickly smell of lilies, felt cold and tomblike. He had the feeling, as he mumbled through the service, that he and his congregation were dead already …

After the service he lingered in the vestry, feeling disinclined to make conversation, but when he got outside he saw that he had not escaped. Miss Doggett and Miss Morrow were waiting in the porch. He felt like some pet animal being led home. As he walked by Miss Doggett’s side, a sudden feeling of despair came over him, wrapping around him like the heavy crimson eiderdown which he so often tossed onto the floor when he woke in the night.

Although occasional characters seem to see a greater depth of mystery and grace and find their faith sustaining, they are the exceptions. Wilmet Forsyth in A Glass of Blessings is one who experiences grace in a deeper manner.

Pym’s faith survived, despite the difficulties of church involvement, and her faith made her thankful. After recovering from a minor stroke, she wrote to a friend:

Luckily one doesn’t brood too much about one’s declining years, being blessed with an optimistic temperament and realizing that there is nothing you can do about it. Also I have faith that I would somehow be sustained—I felt that very much when I was in hospital and couldn’t read or write properly.

I’m glad Barbara Pym’s novels are enjoying a resurgence, albeit a modest one (that in itself is Pym-like); they portray, especially the early novels, a bygone era when innate decency could be assumed; they are witty novels; there is a gentle under­current of the quest for significance and for a satisfying manner of life; and they are rare in that they highlight—but without sneering at—the comic silliness that attends all our lives.