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'I discovered Barbara Pym in my sophomore year of college, thanks to a friend who gave me her 1958 novel, A Glass of Blessings. I loved the book for its understated humor, the way its heroine, Wilmet, mocks her own lack of direction as she drifts through a world divided into church jumble sales, dull sherry parties, and a secret crush on a man who turns out to have a live-in “friend” named Keith. Though the copy was a reprint, I still thought we'd stumbled onto some lost treasure, a forgotten library gem. Soon enough I realized that what I'd stumbled onto was a gigantic literary bandwagon. In 1985, everybody seemed to be reading Barbara Pym, though she herself had been dead for several years.
'Of course, people had different reactions to her. There were readers like me who became annoyingly obsessed with her novels; even our vocabulary reflected it. Whatever slang we'd been speaking before Barbara Pym, we quit using it and started tossing around tweedy words like unpleasantness and cloakroom. Against the advice of our teachers, we took to using the pronoun one as in “One regrets the unpleasantness in the cloakroom.” Less-besotted readers enjoyed Barbara Pym but lumped her in with Miss Read and other writers of “gentle fiction,” a condescending term if there ever was one.
'Still others couldn't see any attraction at all in Pym's stories about women who dote on men and men who accept feminine devotion as their due. They considered her work depressing (men, she said herself, often found it so), uneventful, or simply shallow. A professor of mine said that he found her fiction (he'd read only one novel) “nothing but fluff.” How, he asked, could John Updike have praised her so highly? ...
'Excellent Women appeared in 1952, followed by Jane and Prudence, Less than Angels, A Glass of Blessings, and No Fond Return of Love. These novels of the 1950s (she finished the last by 1960) all share some elements: the distinctive Pym irony, the landscape of London with its crowded lunchrooms and crippled churches, and her recognizable character types. Some of these types include the “splendid” women who know how to deal with life's pivotal events: “birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sale, the garden fete spoiled by bad weather.” Or the maddeningly or perhaps endearingly vain men, whether priests or anthropologists, who imagine that any woman should be glad to do their laundry and proofread their manuscripts. ...
'For me, raised on the dreary fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, Barbara Pym's affectionate irony was a revolution of its own. Though I never successfully applied it to my own writing, it colored the way I looked at life, helping me find a way out of personal pain, or at least giving me hints of a way. Now I see less comedy and more essential sadness in even the brightest of her novels—a feminine longing that underlies all the jokes about dutiful women, charming but vain men, tribalized anthropologists, high-minded priests. I also see the strengthening effects of love and forgiveness upon comedy. If the literary archdeacons of her time couldn't appreciate it, well . . . one does see the irony in that.' -- Betty Smartt Carter, First Things
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Gallery
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Further
The Barbara Pym Society of North America
'The novels of Barbara Pym'
'Philip Hensher toasts the novelist Barbara Pym'
'Marvelous Spinster Barbara Pym At 100'
'Celebrating Barbara Pym'
'Patron Saint of Quiet Lives: A Look2 Essay on Barbara Pym'
'Barbara Pym fans converge on Boston'
'The Blagger's Guide To: Barbara Pym'
Barbara Pym's Desert Island Discs
'Pride and Perseverance'
'Barbara Pym: The Other Jane Austen'
Barbara Pym Doll Miniature Art Collectible
'“Allegra! … Isn’t that lovely?” Names in Barbara Pym’s novels'
Buy 'A Glass of Blessings'
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Extras
The Legacy of Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym's correspondence with her publishers
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Finding a Voice
by Barbara Pym
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I’ve sometimes wondered whether novelists like to be remembered for what they’ve said or because they’ve said it in their own particular way—in their own distinctive voice. But how do you acquire your own voice or indeed any kind of voice? Does it come about as inevitably as your height or the colour of your eyes or do you develop it deliberately, perhaps in imitation of a writer you admire?
I’ve been trying to write novels, with many ups and downs, over more than forty years. I started as a schoolgirl, when I used to contribute to the school magazine—mostly parodies, conscious even then of other people’s styles. Then in 1929, when I was sixteen, I discovered Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow. I came across this sophisticated masterpiece in the wilds of Shropshire, through that marvellous institution Boots’ Library, now, alas, as much of a period memory as the seven and sixpenny hardback novel. I was a keen reader of all kinds of modern fiction, and more than anything else I read at that time Crome Yellow made me want to be a novelist myself. I don’t suppose for a moment that I appreciated the book’s finer satirical points, but it seemed to me funnier than anything I had read before, and the idea of writing about a group of people in a certain situation—in this case upper-class intellectuals in a country house—immediately attracted me, so I decided that I wanted to write a novel like Crome Yellow.
And so my first novel—unpublished, of course—was started in that same year, 1929. It was called Young Men in Fancy Dress and was about a group of “Bohemians”—I must put that word in quotes—who were, in my view, young men living in Chelsea, a district of which I knew nothing at that time. The hero wanted to be a novelist and, as one of the characters put it, “If you want to be a proper novelist, you must get to like town and develop a passion for Chelsea.”
Reading the manuscript again, I detect almost nothing in it of my mature style of writing, except that the Bohemian young men aren’t taken entirely seriously, and that there’s a lot of detail—clothes, makes of cars, golf, and drinks (especially descriptions of cocktails—which . I’d certainly never tasted). I’ve always liked detail—in fact my love of triviality has been criticised—so perhaps that was something I developed early. And obviously at that time I read a lot—if a bit indiscriminately. In this early novel all the “best” or at least the most fashionable names are dropped, from Swinburne and Rupert Brooke to D. H. Lawrence and Beverley Nichols.
When I was eighteen, I went up to Oxford to read English. Most aspiring novelists write at the University, but I didn’t, though I did start to write something in my third year, a description of a man who meant a lot to me. I tore it up, but this person did appear later in a very different guise as one of my best comic male characters. There was nothing comic to me about him at the time, but memory is a great transformer of pain into amusement. And at Oxford, as well as English Literature, I went on reading modern novelists.
I particularly enjoyed the works of “Elizabeth”, the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Such novels as The Enchanted April and The Pastor’s Wife were a revelation in their wit and delicate irony, and the dry, unsentimental treatment of the relationship between men and women which touched some echoing chord in me at that time. I was learning; these novels seemed more appropriate to use as models than Crome Yellow—perhaps even the kind of thing I might try to write myself.
It must also have been about this time—still in the 1930s—that I was introduced to the poems of John Betjeman. His glorifying of ordinary things and buildings and his subtle appreciation of different kinds of churches and churchmanship made an immediate appeal to me. Another author I came across at this time was Ivy Compton-Burnett—I think More Women than Men, her novel about a girls’ school, was the first I read; then A House and Its Head, one of her more typical family chronicles. Of course I couldn’t help being influenced by her dialogue, that precise, formal conversation which seemed so stilted when I first read it— though when I got used to it, a friend and I took to writing to each other entirely in that style. Another book we imitated was Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, a fantasy, written with all the humour and pathos of her poems.
So all the writers I’ve mentioned played some part in forming my own literary style. But of course I’d also been reading the classics, especially Jane Austen and Trollope. Critics discussing my work sometimes tentatively mention these great names, mainly, I think, because I tend to write about the same kind of people and society as they did, although, of course, the ones I write about live in the twentieth century. But what novelist of today would dare to claim that she was influenced by such masters of our craft? Certainly all who read and love Jane Austen may try to write with the same economy of language, even try to look at their characters with her kind of detachment, but that is as far as any “influence” could go.
The concept of “detachment” reminds me of the methods of the anthropologist, who studies societies in this way. The joke definition of anthropology as “the study of man embracing woman” might therefore seem peculiarly applicable to the novelist. After the war, I got a job at the International African Institute in London. I was mostly engaged in editorial work, smoothing out the written results of other people’s researches, but I learned more than that in the process. I learned how it was possible and even essential to cultivate an attitude of detachment towards life and people, and how the novelist could even do “field- work” as the anthropologist did. And I also met a great many people of a type I hadn’t met before. The result of all this was a novel called Less Than Angels, which is about anthropologists working at a research centre in London, and also the suburban background of Deirdre, one of the heroines, and her life with her mother and aunt. There’s a little church life in it too, so that it could be said to be a mixture of all the worlds I had experience of. I felt in this novel that I was breaking new ground by venturing into the academic scene, although in many ways that isn’t unlike the worlds of the village and parish I’d written about up to then.
I admire those people who can produce a new book regularly every year. I’ve found it more difficult as time goes on. I suppose it’s easy for anyone to produce their first novel—it’s all there inside you and only needs to be written down. Also a second and third may be just under the surface and comparatively easy to dig out. After that it becomes more difficult, unless you’re prepared to go on writing exactly the same book with only slight variations, over and over again. And people are always very ready to tell you anecdotes from their own experience—which, in their opinion, would be just the thing for one of your novels. Read- ers who don’t like your kind of story sometimes suggest plots or subjects for you in the hope that you may write something different. And sometimes, especially when things aren’t going well, it’s tempting to give it a try.
(the entirety)
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Book
Barbara Pym A Glass of Blessings
Virago Press
'Barbara Pym’s early novel takes us into 1950s England, where life revolved around the village green and the local church—as seen through the funny, engaging, yearning eyes of a restless housewife
'Wilmet Forsyth is bored. Bored with the everyday routine of her provincial village life. Bored with teatimes filled with local gossip. Bored with her husband, Rodney, a military man who dotes on her. But on her thirty-third birthday, Wilmet’s conventional life takes a turn when she runs into the handsome brother of her close friend.
'Attractive and enigmatic, Piers Longridge is a mystery Wilmet is determined to solve. Rather than settling down, he lived in Portugal, then returned to England for a series of odd jobs. Driven by a fantasy of romance, the sheltered, naïve Englishwoman sets out to seduce Piers—only to discover that he isn’t the man she thinks he is.
'As cozy as sharing a cup of tea with an old friend, A Glass of Blessings explores timeless themes of sex, marriage, religion, and friendship while exposing our flaws and foibles with wit, compassion, and a generous helping of love.' -- Open Road
Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Well, and without the brains and meaning and edge too. I know you dislike Salinger, but, as a lover of his prose, I'm quite excited about those possible forthcoming books. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, T. You liked 'The Canyons' too. Hm. I guess I'll get on that. I'm not a big fan of Schrader's directing, but of course I do like how he always slips in Bressonisms. Yeah, must see, I guess. You see the Ray Davies thing? Interesting. We should totally do a Sellers/Davies meet up film, a 'My Dinner with Andre' type of thing maybe. Accents? Good question. I don't think I could do a convincing British accent, though. Maybe an unconvincing American accent. Maybe they/we could be getting into character for some upcoming America-based something or other. ** œ, Hi. I remember liking WCW's poetry pretty well in a kind of young, aspiring poet to established poet-style admiration for what he manages to pull off, language- and effect-wise, but I haven't read a thing by him in a very long time, so who knows. So glad you like the Nakaya book! She's a great person in addition to her work's greatness. ** Wolf, Hi, bigger W! Oh, sorry about the blog's loading time. There has been short run of giant, information packed posts in recent days. That could be part of it. I think my having fallen so in love with gifs might be a culprit too 'cos they're time eaters. After a whopper tomorrow, the posts should be fairly modest for a while. Unless it becomes a widespread headache and hassle, I kind of want to keep doing the blog the way I do with 'too big' posts sometimes because, I don't know ... I like fucking with the format, I guess. Anyway, I'm sorry for the impatience-creating load times, and I hope it'll get easier once tomorrow's post is in the archives. Interesting about the not getting performance art now as opposed to before. I mean, yeah, whatever works and feeds and all that, right? For me, performance art is up there with sculpture as my favorite art mediums, I think, for whatever reason. Hm. Great thinkfest about Acconci. That was an awesome boon. I love your mind, Wolfster. Oh, ha ha, right, about the cliff confusion. I guess I thought 'scrambling' would do the trick, but I can see how that's actually kind of an awesome idea of a thing to do. For some people, I mean. I don't know about me. Maybe me, hm, I don't know. Def. on the time and place for both. I still think it should be more like 'temporary facts' or 'facts-in-progress' or 'facts by consensus' or something rather than just 'facts' with its distrustful tone of certainty or something. But that's why I don't try to cure cancer. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Oh, yeah, I probably could have been impressed by them personally. I don't see why not, and certainly they're young guys in the middle of a fascinating moment/situation. I'm sure I would have asked them something about overexposure. I assume they leave all that to their managers and team or whoever, but, yeah. I hope that whatever makes seeing American football live a good thing was a good thing when you were in the crowd. ** MANCY, HI, man. I don't know of Kimbery Kubis, no, and when I went to that web address you linked to, all I found was a white page and the words 'permanently down'. Is that her/his work, or is the site just down? I'll google search the name in bit. Thanks a lot for the alert! ** Steevee, Hi. Like I said, there's been a short run of dense posts, and I'm hoping the slowness thing will ease up. Glad your plumbing got righted. So, you think the hair in the drain was a melange of generations of previous tenants' hair? Oh, I don't know, about the One Direction questions. It was a cancelled possibility before I had time to think about it. Definitely questions that they hopefully wouldn't be expecting or at least wouldn't be prepared to answer in a rote way. I'm not sure. I haven't seen their new video, no. I'll go watch it. ** Grant maierhofer, Thanks a gazillion again, Grant! It was super great. How was your weekend? ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. I did have a cool weekend. You? Good move on setting up the site. I'll go devour it when I'm done here, of course. Everybody, Mr, Thomas 'Moore' Moronic has set up a tumblr/site for his imminently (September 17th) forthcoming first novel 'A Certain Kind of Light' (Rebel Satori Press), including an excerpt among other goodies. You should totally click this and go have a long look, if you want my opinion. ** Gary gray, Hi. Oh, nice about getting into FYF. Not to mention as a VIP. Death Grips actually performed? I mean, they were there? That's cool 'cos I'd read about them doing that installation art piece sans their presence for their recent gigs. Anyway, very cool, man. Take some envy in the friendliest form. ** Rewritedept, Hey. Cool, no doubt, about the Lemmy book. I watched some video of last night's Mats reunion gig this morning, and I thought they were pretty great. I got chills even. Yeah, Zac and I went over the existing script and revised/refined it into something much, much better. We threw out out one of the scenes, which was both not so good and really kind of unfilmable, and Zac came up with this completely genius new scene to replace it, and I'm putting it into a draft of wordage today, and then we'll go over it and refine it into what he intended. It's going really great, yeah. 'Life Aquatic' is genius. It was always my fave of his, but I think 'Moonrise Kingdom' has replaced it maybe. I'm guessing we won't get a long set out of Deerhunter since they're on a very long festival bill, but who knows? I'll take whatever I can get. No S-K this weekend, but what a good idea. I've read about the Kathleen Hannah doc, but that's all. And I haven't seen the Big Star doc yet. Will do when it's in my orbit. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. That residency sounds fantastic! I'm so glad you're going for it. Are you hoping for the November slot, or does the timing matter? Fingers obviously crossed into a tangled mess that you get it. ** Martin Bladh, Hi, Martin. Great, exciting, thank you so much! ** Schlix, Uli! Hey, dude! It's been forever! How sweet to have you delurked. Your 'English Little League' listening fest is indeed a perfect occasion to arise. How are you? What's been going on? Catch me up, please, if you don't mind. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey, J. You haven't seen any of those R-G films? You're in for a big quadruple treat, man. I don't even know what 'The World's End' is. It hasn't been covered here yet, I don't think. Actually, unless I'm forgetting something, I don't even know what 'Hot Fuzz' is. I guess I'll go find out. Cool about the b'day celeb, and, of course, about the novel tinkering. My weekend was good. Great porn script progress as well as novel progress and lots of best friend hanging out time and lots of nicely gloomy rain. ** Sypha, Hi, James. Glad you were able to take a second dip into the event, and, yeah, what a very nice weekend you had there, and so deserved. ** Okay. Back in the 1980s, it seemed like everybody I knew was into Barbara Pym, as was I, but I haven't heard her talked about very much recently, so I thought I'd break the relative silence. See you tomorrow.