The Life and Work of Barbara Pym

219 Pages·1987·23.261 MB·English

by  Dale Salwak (eds.)

THE LIFE AND WORK OF BARBARA PYM
THE LIFE AND
WORK OF
BARBARAPYM
Edited by
Dale Salwak
Professor of English
Citrus College, California
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
© Dale Salwak 1987
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission
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First published 1987
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Typeset by Wessex Typesetters
(Division of The Eastern Press Ltd)
Frome, Somerset
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
The life and work of Barbara Pym.
1. Pym, Barbara - Criticism and
interpretation
I. Salwak, Dale
823'.914 PR6066.Y58Z/
ISBN 978-1-349-08540-8 ISBN 978-1-349-08538-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-08538-5
For Hilary Walton
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgements and Note on References xi
Notes on the Contributors xii
Part I The Life
1 Excellent Woman Shirley Hazzard 3
2 The Quest for a Career Constance Malloy 4
3 The Novelist in the Field: 1946-74 Hazel Holt 22
4 Fellow Writers in a Cotswold Village
Gilbert Phelps 34
Part II The Work
5 Barbara Pym's Novelistic Genius
Joyce Carol Oates 43
6 The World of Barbara Pym Penelope Lively 45
7 Where, Exactly, is the Pym World? John Bayley 50
8 How Pleasant to Know Miss Pym Robert Smith 58
9 Miss Pym and Miss Austen A. L. Rowse 64
10 Love and Marriage in the Novels
Mary Strauss-Noll 72
11 Barbara Pym and the War of the Sexes
John Halperin 88
12 The Novelist as Anthropologist Muriel Schulz 101
13 Literary Allusions in the Novels Lotus Snow 120
14 The Narrative Sense of Barbara Pym
Robert f. Graham 142
15 The Pym Papers Janice Rossen 156
vii
viii Contents
Part III In Retrospect
16 The Rejection of Barbara Pym Philip Larkin 171
17 A Success Story Robert Liddell 176
18 The Importance of Connecting
Frances H. Bachelder 185
19 Years of Neglect Gail Godwin 193
Notes 194
Select Bibliography 203
Index 206
Preface
The rising tide of interest in Barbara Pym since 1977, when both
Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil identified her as one of the
most underrated writers of the twentieth century,1 invites a
comprehensive, up-to-date survey of her life and work. This
collection responds to that invitation by bringing together in one
volume essays specially written for the occasion (with only a few
exceptions) by nineteen distinguished men and women.
The volume is divided into three sections. The essays in Part I
consider Barbara Pym's life. Those in Part II evaluate her novels
from a variety of fresh perspectives. And the contributions which
make up Part III discuss, in a general way, her human and artistic
achievement. Together, all these provide special insight into the
work, the woman behind the work, and the wide appeal of both.
Ideally the reader of this book is someone who has already
encountered the pleasures of Pym' s novels and wants to know
more about them as well as their author. At the same time many
people have heard of Barbara Pym but have not yet read her
works, and I hope that this book will be useful to them as well.
Several of the contributors knew Barbara Pym. I feel deprived
at never having met her. I am told that she was very much like
her characters: dignified, friendly, honest, humorous and
unpretentious. Photographs of her reveal the sort of gentle,
intelligent face we expect to see in wise, kind teachers, reflecting
an unselfishness and a patient endurance. One acquaintance
wrote, 'She had that wonderful combination of quiet charm and
good manners that made you feel she really wanted to talk to
you.'2 Another wrote, 'In meeting Barbara one never felt that she
had missed out on any part of life.'3
It is appropriate that twelve of the nineteen contributors to this
volume should live outside Great Britain. This offers testimony to
her international readership. The reasons for her ever-growing
acclaim are many and varied, of course, and on that matter I shall
let the contributors speak for themselves. Certainly her appeal to
the reading public lies partly in her fulfilment of the most
fundamental requirements of any great writer: that she be a
ix
Preface
X
storyteller, a teacher, but, above all, an enchanter. 4 Barbara Pym
has done what the greatest and liveliest writers usually do: she
has made a world that is uniquely her own, an enchanted place
both real and varied. 'In minute, breathtaking ways, she sizes up
the harms, the conventions, the pleasures, and the perversities of
small lives and bestows upon them the rare beauty and clarity of
her own genius.'5
Like many admirers, I came upon her novels through the
recommendation of a friend. Three years later, in 1983, after I had
read everything by her and about her that I could find, the idea
occurred to me to produce a volume of essays. Early in 1984 I
wrote to people I knew who were familiar with her work. One
colleague's response typifies the letters I received: 'You have hit
me in a vulnerable place: I love Barbara Pym.'6 That it has been
possible to produce this collection within a comparatively short
time is owing to the enthusiasm of the contributors. I am indebted
to all of them.
I am also indebted to a number of good people who have
expressed from its beginning a keen interest in this project. I
should like to thank the following for their personal encouragement
and professional advice: Professor John Halperin of Vanderbilt
University; Professor Stephen C. Moore of the University of
Southern California; Professor Edwin A. Dawes of the University
of Hull; Professors David Sundstrand and Linda Humphrey of
Citrus College; Paul DeAngelis, Caroline Press and Jean Rawitt of
E. P. Dutton; Frances A. Arnold of the Macmillan Press; Catherine
Aird, Hazel Holt, Hilary Walton and the late Philip Larkin; my wife,
Patricia; and my parents, Stanley and Frances H. Salwak. To all of
them I am indeed grateful.
'No reputation is more than snowfall. It vanishes.'7 True for
some writers, perhaps, but Barbara Pym's reputation may be an
exception. Her books are attracting an ever-widening audience as
the years pass. Now the critical interest is there as well.
'Quiet, paradoxical, funny and sad,' Eudora Welty wrote in
1982, '[Barbara Pym's novels] have the iron in them of permanence
too.'8 I cannot improve upon that judgement.
Here, then, is the life and work of Barbara Pym - a writer
whose time has come.
DALESALWAK
Glendora and London
Acknowledgements and
Note on References
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission
to reprint previously published materials: the late Philip Larkin and
Macmillan London for the Foreword to An Unsuitable Attachment
(1982), reprinted here as 'The Rejection of Barbara Pym'; Penelope
Lively and the editor for 'The World of Barbara Pym', Literary
Review, 1 (1980) 8-9; Robert Smith and the editor for 'How Pleasant to
Know Miss Pym', Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 11
(1971) 63-8; John Murray (Publishers) Ltd for 'Business Girls', in
fohn Betjeman's Collected Poems, 1980.
The pieces by Gail Godwin, Shirley Hazzard and Joyce Carol
Oates were written to be read on the occasion of 'A Celebration of
Barbara Pym', the Gramercy Park Hotel, 3 October 1984, and are
here published for the first time by the kind permission of the
authors and Paul DeAngelis, E. P. Dutton, New York.
Page references to the novels (citing the most recent British
editions, as listed in the Bibliography) are supplied in the notes
at the end of the book. Letters, diaries and manuscripts lodged at
the Bodleian Library, Oxford, are generally cited by manuscript
number (prefixed PYM) or, in some instances, by page in A Very
Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters, by the kind
permission of Hazel Holt and Tim Rogers.
Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright-holders,
but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will
be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first
opportunity.
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