Barbara Pym and the Novel of Manners

231 Pages·1992·22.678 MB·English

by  Annette Weld (auth.)

BARBARA PYM AND THE NOVEL OF MANNERS
Barbara Pytn and the
Novel of Manners
ANNETTE WELD
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-21692-5 ISBN 978-1-349-21690-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21690-1
©Annette Weld 1992
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1992
ISBN 978-0-312-06808-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weld, Annette.
Barbara Pym and the novel of manners I Annette Weld.
P· em.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-06808-0
1. Pym, Barbara-Criticism and interpretation. 2. Manners and
customs in literature. I. Title.
PR6066.Y58Z94 1992
821'.914-dc20 91-22283
CIP
Contents
List of Abbreviations vi
Acknowledgements vii
1 Manners and Comedy 1
2 Poems, Stories, and Radio Scripts 18
3 The Early Novels 47
4 Something 'Very Barbara Pym' 82
5 Rejection, Resurrection, Valediction 149
6 Conclusion 203
Notes 206
Bibliography 213
Index 221
v
List of Abbreviations
All references are to the Macmillan editions of Pym' s novels and are
cited parenthetically in the text as the following acronyms.
Some Tame Gazelle STG
Crampton Hodnet CH
Jane and Prudence JP
Excellent Women EW
A Glass of Blessings AGOB
Less than Angels LTA
No Fond Return of Love NFRL
An Unsuitable Attachment AVA
The Sweet Dove Died TSDD
An Academic Question AAQ
Quartet in Autumn QIA
A Few Green Leaves AFGL
Civil to Strangers CTS
A Very Private Eye AVPE
Acknowledgements
For permission to quote from the collection of Pym papers I thank
Hazel Holt, Hilary Walton, and the staff of the Department of
Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Room 132. Colin Harris of that
library provided much help, both long-distance and on-the-spot,
over a period of several years and my thanks go to him for his
patience.
Thanks are due to Macmillan London Ltd, E.P. Dutton Inc, and
the Estate of Barbara Pym for permission to quote from the novels,
and to Faber & Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Giroux Inc for
permission to include Philip Larkin's 'Posterity' from High Windows
© 1974, Philip Larkin. I am also grateful to the representatives of
the Philip Larkin Estate for their permission to quote from the
Larkin-Pym correspondence.
Other of Pym's correspondents granted their kind permission
to include extracts from their letters, including R. S. Smith, Paul
de Angelis, and the estate of Lord David Cecil. Kate Heberlein
graciously allowed me to quote from her fine dissertation on
Pym, and several others including Geoffrey Holt, Colin Harris, P.
T. Baxter, and Alfred Harris contributed their remembrances.
My grateful appreciation and sincere thanks are owed to many
for the completion of this work, but especially to Hazel Holt and
Hilary Walton for their kindness and inspiration; to professors J. W.
Johnson and Bette London for their advice and encouragement in its
early stages; to the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women's Studies
at the University of Rochester for the grant enabling me to visit
Oxfordshire and the Bodleian Library; to my friend Lotus Snow for
her superb editing skills and unwavering confidence in me.
Most of all I thank Chip and our children, for their patience, their
computer, and their love.
ANNETTE WELD
1
Manners and Comedy
Two years before her death in 1980, Barbara Pym described to a
radio audience her ideal of artistic immortality:
One of my favorite quiz games on television some years ago was
the one in which panelists were asked to guess the authorship of
certain passages which were read out to them, and then to discuss
various features of the author in question. There were no prizes
for guessing, no moving belt of desirable objects passing before
their eyes, just the pleasure and satisfaction of recognizing the
unmistakable voice of Henry James or Henry Greene, or whoever
it might be. I think that's the kind of immortality most authors
would want - to feel that their work would be immediately
recognisable as having been written by them and by nobody
else. But of course it's a lot to ask for. (MS Pym 98, fol. 125)1
As well as admiring Pym's candor here, we can congratulate her
success. In twelve novels, a posthumously issued autobiography,
and numerous unpublished stories and journals, Pym's voice is
'immediately recognisable', witty, dry, perceptive. Popular and lit
erary acclaim for her work was late, swift, and appropriately ironic,
but complete enough to warrant inclusion in both best seller lists
and college curricula. So familiar and distinctive is her imagined
world that only a few years after Pym' s death a fictional narrator can
complain, 'Encounters like that ... make me feel like a character
in Barbara Pym. Perhaps that's what I am: anima naturaliter Pym',2
and feel no further need for explanation. Her work has engendered
popular success and survived close critical examination.
Pym's world of solitaries and small comforts is, as she hoped,
'unmistakably' her own. Curates, spinsters, academics, and librar
ians lead lives circumscribed by indecision; small worlds collide,
characters converge and recoil, much conversation and little action
1
2 Barbara Pym and the Novel of Manners
occur, and the social scene is barely altered. Her readers have come
to expect the tightly controlled evocation of postwar Britain, the
exposition of characters slightly threadbare but of good family,
and the working out of a plot with less than world-shattering
consequences. She never disappoints them.
Yet seldom in contemporary fiction do we find an author whose
canon is simultaneously so homogeneous and so distinctive. Never
straying far from the self-imposed restrictions of place and person,
Pym within that limited frame creates in each novel a social mosaic
that both comforts and disturbs, as familiar as an old lace tablecloth
and as difficult to lean on. Loneliness and self-doubt go hand in
hand with cozy cups of tea and printed silks; the reassurance of the
recognisable is often undermined by the price paid for stasis. The
What Ifs of life haunt these works, and while the social comedy is
broad, the doubting persists.
And what of the woman behind the authorial voice? A cursory
glance reveals an Oxford-educated editor of a small but respected
anthropological journal whose life, if not measured out in coffee
spoons, at least weathered none of the female upheavals of marriage
and family. To dismiss Pym as a character from her own collection,
however, is to overlook the rich sensuousness of her college days,
the passions of several unrequited loves, and the efforts of work in
the wartime WRNS or at her writing and editing. As her friend and
literary executor, Hazel Holt, has noted, 'her shyness and reticence
concealed much of the variety and complexity of her personality'.3
Pym's family and friends, war work and professional life moved her
in and out of a series of contained communities which provided rich
material for a novelist concerned with social behavior.
Shy and reticent Barbara Mary Crampton Pym may have been,
but these qualities did not deny her a headstrong plunge into life.
Born during the first world war to supportive parents and middle
class comfort, Barbara and her younger sister Hilary led what Hilary
calls 'a happy, unclouded childhood' (AVPE, 2). They learned
Gilbert and Sullivan from the local operatic society, shared the
organ-stool while their mother played parish hymns, and enjoyed
encouragement from an extended family in their separate talents.
Indeed, Barbara's first public success came at the age of nine: an
operetta, The Magic Diamond (MS Pym 98, fols 1-12) written for an
Easter reunion with favorite cousins. Separated only during their
school and university days, the sisters remained close confidantes
and friends throughout their lives. Barbara, Hilary relates, even
Manners and Comedy 3
based her first fully rounded characters, Belinda and Harriet Bede,
on her speculaions about the aging Barbara and Hilary Pym.
It was never our particular intention, in spite of the prophetic
circumstances of Some Tame Gazelle, which she had started in
1934, to live together, but it somehow turned out that from about
1938 right up until the time of her death in 1980 we were never
apart for more than a year or so at a time. (AVPE, 4-5)
Amiable and tolerant, both the sisters Bede and Pym radiate the
warmth of mutual affection and support.
Entering St. Hilda's College, Oxford, in 1931, Pym set out eagerly
to discover the pleasures and passions of Oxford social and, second
arily, academic life:
15 January. A new term in a new year - golden opportunities
(and how!) to get a moderator - a peer's heir - a worthy
theological student-or events change entirely; But Oxford really
is intoxicating. (MS Pym 101, fol. 5)
The early journals record with adolescent breathlessness rounds
of sherry parties, cinema dates, and a succession of young men.
Subsequent entries detail plots or single scenes for novels, quo
tations from favorite authors, or observations of human behavior
that might bear later development. Journals and notebooks became
a lifelong habit beginning in these years- 'mercifully less personal
and introspective as the years go on' - a sixty year old Pym
will later admit. 4 While the reader may grow impatient with the
schoolgirl sections, later ones follow the growth of the mature
woman and the accomplished author. When collected along with
selected correspondence in A Very Private Eye, they chart the ebb
and flow of Pym's personal and artistic life.
Perhaps predictably, the central section of this collection, entitled
'The Published Novelist', is also the briefest. After too generously
detailing Oxford and the war years, the book offers disappointingly
few details of her most productive period.
February 20, 1946: There is so much that I want to write now,
that I hardly know where to begin. But I feel I must also have a
job, not only because of earning money but because I find routine
work soothing (as long as it is not too boring) and the best way of