Barbara Pym’s Problem Comedy - New English Review

by John Broening (April 2018)

Mayotte Magnus/The Barbara Pym Society

Eternal, unchanging England, then. But after that war, Little England began have another connotation: attenuated, retrenched, post-colonial England.

The tradition of the English pessimism: the pessimism of, oh, King Lear, Joy Division, Eleanor Rigby, Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘What is Our Life?, Thomas Hardy’s poems (and Thomas Hardy’s novels).

There are bad times just around the corner.
The horizon’s gloomy as can be
There are black birds over
The grayish cliffs of Dover
And the rats are preparing to leave the BBC

Writing in 1983 about the beginnings of the project of European unity and, prophetically, about the difficulties the English would have in the EU, Luigi Barzini made some trenchant observations about the English character:

. . . the animal has always played such an important symbolic role in the intimate and public life of the country. To calm a difficult, spirited animal over jumps, in the hunting field or in the littered chaos and tumult of the battlefield, a rider must avoid the quick reflexes of the Latin and show imperturbable steadiness . . . Surely it was their hard life that taught the British to be brave, resourceful, patient, far-seeing, self-controlled, or to act as if they were. In one word, they are stoics.

Stoicism is at the heart of the novels of Barbara Pym, but a kind of curdled stoicism in which nobility only rarely plays a part, a stoicism which is manifested in people only rarely saying what they mean or meaning what they say, by a politeness, which as John Updike noted after visiting England, is largely territorial in character. A stoicism of growing quietly insane, or slowly starving yourself to death in the solitude of your bed-sit, of welcoming, with grim satisfaction, life’s attenuated choices.

Philip Larkin, Pym’s friend and champion, wrote:

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise—
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house!
But it’s chess

Every literary age has a handful of representative figures, writers whose stature is amplified not just by the quality and fecundity of their work but by what their lives embody in relationship to that age. Marlowe with his raffishness and his occult learning. Byron with his larger-than-life personality and his revolutionary fervor. Dickens, who wrote, declaimed and procreated himself into any early grave, and whose rise from a debtor’s prison to fame and fortune was enabled through a literacy which also represented the social and political aspirations of his readers. In our time, there is Zadie Smith who personifies multicultural, meritocratic England.

For postwar England, the representative poet is without doubt Larkin. Larkin, who never married, seldom travelled abroad, worked as a librarian, wrote and published little and made Little England his central subject.

Among novelists, Barbara Pym, possibly. Pym, who never married, edited an obscure periodical, rarely travelled, cultivated a series of unsatisfying relationships with unavailable young men, and wrote the same novel—a short, neat, wry, bleak social comedy set in a shabby genteel-to-genteel Little England—from the beginning to the end of her career.

III

The Sweet Dove Died, written between 1963 and 1969 but not published until 1978, might be called Barbara Pym’s Problem Comedy.

—and uncertainty—free product of the conscious mind.

James is orphaned, we learn:

There was something about the idea of an orphan that brought out the best in Humphrey, that desire to do good without too much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us.

It is that Janian note, the chilly epigrammatic judgment whose subject is always human nature., (Why are there so few great optimistic, utopian epigrams? Perhaps because an optimistic epigram is not an epigram but a bumper sticker. Or a motivational poster.)

In her well-appointed house, James and Leonora begin their peculiar relationship, quaint though strangely modern, a sexless, self-protective dance of mutual flattery mediated through the language of antiques:

‘I think Victoriana do suit you,’ he said, ‘you look exactly right in that chair.’

Leonora bowed her head in acknowledgement of the tribute, for she was used to receiving compliments gracefully.

‘I think you belong to some earlier period,’ she mused. ‘Perhaps the eighteenth century? One can imagine a portrait you leaning against a ruined pillar.’

James and Leonora’s relationship grows, not in depth but through routine, until James goes on holiday in Spain and Portugal. And as with so many Englishmen before or since, a journey to a warmer climate unleashes something previously suppressed.

wise?”). The characteristics of a caricature are that it is both a flattening of detail and a concentration of energy. Meaning that caricatures in literature are often catalysts for the main action of the story.

It’s not hard to suss out the real-life prototype for Ned. At the time the novel was being written, another Ned was creating a succes de scandale: Ned Rorem, whose Paris Diaries were published in England in the mid-Sixties. Like the fictional Ned, real Ned was in the arts, as a composer and writer, made no secret of what he was, seemed to stir up drama wherever he went, and had a deep streak of articulate cruelty. (He described the death throes of an acquaintance as moving him no more than would the twitchings of a scorpion.)

“. . . what have such horrors as crabs, bedbugs and piles to do with musical inspiration and the ‘crushing necessity to be an artist’?” Harold Acton wrote in a harshly negative review of the Diaries in the British press. “How should I know?” Rorem replied in a subsequent published diary (having a publishable diary always allows you to have the last word.) ”I’m the artist, he’s the aesthete.” Ouch.

Fictional Ned, who returns with James to England to spend a sabbatical year at Oxford researching Keats’s minor poems, contrives to separate Leonora from the passive and easily manipulatable James.

Dyson’s downfall is his ambition is to appear on TV. When he has the opportunity to do so, he is paralyzed by a sense of self-importance and can do no more than mechanically murmur and nod. As in The Sweet Dove Died, the catalyst for the action is the arrival of an American, an editor named Morris, who brings his own typewriter to work and smokes a pipe and catches the ear of the publisher with his ideas for appealing to the youth market. Like Ned, Morris is a figure of pure will. As in any novel of manners, it is the outsider, unbound by the norms of the society he enters, who shakes things up. Morris, like Ned, like many Americans in England at the time, is treated by the author with a kind of disdainful wonderment.

As James, for whom Leonora has evicted her elderly lodger and installed his belongings in a flat in her house, starts to avoid Leonora, she begins to suffer, probably for the first time in her life. And of course, after Ned achieves his goal, he begins to get bored with James. (“James would be no exception to the rule that nobody tired of Ned before he tired of them.”)

Her throat ached and tears came into her eyes, not only for herself but also for the owners of the jewellery, ageing now or old, some probably dead. It was all she could do to walk composedly out of the room, down the wide staircase and into the street. She felt lost, uncertain what to do or where to go, and began walking aimlessly. She must have collided with somebody unknowingly, for she was conscious of a woman apologizing in a well-bred voice that had a note of surprise in it, as if Leonora were behaving in a peculiar way.

Lenora allows herself to break down in front of her dowdy friend Meg who, like her, has a gay young man who sees her only when he needs her company.

—but only flashes—of compassion in Leonora. The idea that trauma might transform or uplift her character as it does, say, Huck Finn, is alien to Pym’s dour vision of the world.

novelists as well as playwrights—do best, a scene of both comedy and pathos set in a well-furnished room, in which what is crucial is what is, stoically, unspoken and undone:

After Ned returns to America, James comes back, asking for forgiveness:

She and James had both been hurt, but it hardly seemed to make a bond between them—it was like a barrier or a wedge driving them apart.

‘But not us, Leonora. I’m sorry if I hurt you. Won’t you forgive me?’

As he begins to skulk away, defeated, James spots his uncle on his way to see Leonora clutching an absurdly large bunch of peonies while “fussily trying each door of the car to make sure it was locked.”

And it is here the novel ends.

With a little adjustment and possibly by treating the subject of homosexuality with a Jamesian periphrasis, the novel could take place in—or could have been written in—1948 or even 1928.

You can imagine Pym’s anxiety while she was writing The Sweet Dove Died: her half-hearted attempts to make the novel contemporary were probably defeated by a sense that the culture was moving too rapidly for her to assimilate. The fact that she set the novel in the world of old precious objects suggests that she had little appetite to begin with for facing the changing present.

One can make a good argument that in England in 1968, there were a large number of people who were living as if it still were 1948. The best part of Robert Greenfield’s Ain’t It Time We Said Goodbye, Robert Greenfield’s account of the Rolling Stones’s 1971 tour of England, are his accounts of the band’s brushes with Little England, usually in the form of encounters with ancient backstage functionaries:

Asked to perform even the simplest task before a show, their response was always ”Oh, I can’t do that. It’s more than me job’s worth” Having somehow managed to survive two world wars as well, as . . . terrible food rationing . . . they were all members in good standing of the generation that had always considered the Stones an affront not just to national dignity but moral rectitude as well.

But what was at stake was not a full account of the present. It was Pym’s tone, that dry, stoic-ironic tone that was not just a reflection of the author’s voice but of the characters’.

Look, for example, at a novel by an old-guard novelist that actually tries to tackle rather than avoid the Sixties, Anthony Powell’s Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last volume of his A Dance to the Music of Time. The combination of the groovy subject matter-drugs, hippies, pop culture, the crackpot social theories of the time-with the same old astringent, aloof, mandarin Anthony Powell tone is, to put it mildly, discordant. It reminds me, in its comic/surrealist incongruity, of those animated collages that connect the old Monty Python sketches.

Jane Austin

The Barbara Pym revival has come and gone. Pym, in her way, is too sour, too bleak for many people’s taste.

(Did I mention that she is not just witty but funny? Quietly hilarious in that dry English way?:

Humphrey rose to carve it. He was one of the men who are at their best with a carving knife and here was meat worthy of his talent.

. . . but after a while there was something almost enjoyable about her tediously detailed account of the flight to Paris, the coach journey through France and Switzerland the arrival at Lake Maggiore. Her friend’s upset stomach and dislike of Continental Catholicism were made vivid to James, so that he found himself sharing in their relief at the eventual return to good plain food and the Anglican Church.)

The greatest literary revival of the last 40 years has not been Barbara Pym’s modest rehabilitation but the apotheosis of another Jane Austen-like writer: Jane Austen. Repeated filmings and television serializations of all the novels. Rewrites of Pride and Prejudice like Bridget Jones’ Diary. Rewrites of Sense and Sensibility like Clueless. Jane Austen Book Clubs. The novel called The Jane Austen Book Club. The film adaptation of the novel. On my desk as I write this is a brand new book called Jane on the Brain: Exploring the Science of Social Intelligence with Jane Austen.

What is missing from Pym’s novels that is present in Jane Austen’s is something that many women and a few men today dream about: successful old-fashioned courtship, usually involving the young, the attractive, and, sometimes, the moneyed. Just as the remarkable success of The Fifty Shades series (125 million copies sold!) seems to show that, as comedian Bill Maher has pointed out, despite the #MeToo movement, there are significant numbers of women whose greatest fantasy is to be bound, blindfolded and lightly tortured by a handsome, mysterious young billionaire.

Pym’s suitors and love objects are, alas, too old, too poor, too self-absorbed, too undesirable or too miserable to stay the course.

VII

But Jane Austen and her literary followers seem to have little say about contemporary Britain. The best writers have turned not to her but to another model: Dickens. As England has changed, prospered, diversified, internationalized and devolved, and seemingly lost its reserve and stoicism, a new paradigm was needed, one which could accommodate the bright, separate worlds, the larger-than-life characters, the self-promoting grotesques, the strivers and the desperate hustlers. Dickens has become the explicit model for sprawling, disordered novels like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and In The Kitchen, Martin Amis’s Lionel Abso and John Lancaster’s Capital.

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John Broening is a freelance writer based in Denver, Colorado. His writing has appeared in Gastronomica, Departures, The Baltimore Sun, The City Paper, The Faster Times and The Outlet and his article on the Noble Swine Supper Club was featured in Best Food Writing 2012.

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