Barbara Pym’s writing is probably something of an acquired taste. Her well-observed, delicate, deceptively light and funny novels are steeped in the world of the churchgoing middle class she knew so well. You can read them just as a gentle sending up of that world, almost like a comedy of manners. Very little really happens in them. Emotions are hinted at, loves suggested or coveted but rarely fulfilled, apparently trivial things filling up the lives of people who seem to have very little to do apart from observing each other’s foibles. Some people have compared them to Jane Austen’s novels. They’re lighter, gentler, less resolved in the end, but beautifully written.
Yet they have serious undercurrents. Pym, born just before the First World War, and the daughter of a lawyer, was a churchgoer throughout her life, mostly attending Anglo-Catholic churches. She had a number of intense love affairs, but didn’t marry or have children. Themes of unrequited love, social class and its infinitesimally small gradations, education and literary inspiration run through her novels. But so does a preoccupation with the gap between high moral and religious aspirations, and the practical, if not downright comic, disappointments of everyday life. I’m not sure that you can say that this in itself makes her novels somehow typically Anglican, but it’s tempting to do so: there’s a sort of modesty and caution about her view of religion, which is sometimes assumed to be intrinsically Anglican, a sort of fusion of emotion, pragmatism and faith in a complex personal via media.
To me, though, what’s really striking about her work, making it fascinating to me, but also probably by the same token dating it somewhat, is the assumption of the centrality of religion to her social world. Yes, it’s a world observed from one particular standpoint. There are few Dissenters in her novels. Roman Catholics feature mostly as somewhat dangerous threats or temptations at the margins of her characters’ experience. Anyone who grew up in an Anglican parish in the 1950s and 60s – well, before then too, of course – will recognise the gallery of characters she parades – the elderly spinsters, the well-meaning but ineffectual clergy, the do-gooding and interfering ladies of the parish, the somewhat exotic or bohemian people who flit in and out of church, the forceful vicar’s wives who really run the parish, and so on. Yet none of these people are dismissed or treated contemptuously. Without trying to analyse them, Pym manages to capture both their absurd and their serious sides, and shows the reader something of what they’re really like.
It’s probably the early novels for which she’s best known, apart from her late work Quartet in Autumn (1977), and my favourite is Excellent Women (1952). It’s written in the first person, the narrator Mildred Lathbury being an unmarried young-ish woman who harbours some longing for the rogueish Rockingham Napier, although everyone seems to assume she ought to get married to Father Malory, the priest at the ‘high’ church she goes to, and who lives his sister. But she is uncertain about Malory, Malory is distracted by the arrival of a beautiful young woman as a tenant, Mrs Napier leaves her husband Rockingham, and on the fringes of Mildred’s world hovers an austere anthropologist (there are many anthropologists in Pym’s novels) who plainly is attracted to Mildred and shares her religious seriousness, but seems strangely elusive. Nothing is fully resolved at the end – as I say, that is one of the contrasts with Jane Austen. But the ebb and flow of these relationships is peppered with comments on church life, and it’s a church life which is characteristically that of suburban High Anglicanism, particularly of the mid-twentieth century. There is no thought of the ordination of women. Yet women basically run the church. The men – the male clergy I mean – are mostly a bit full of themselves, sometimes pompous, sometimes rather drippy. Here’s a little exchange between Mildred and the acerbic Sister Blatt about Father Greatorex, standing uncertainly in the middle of a jumble sale:
“Sister Blatt looked at me and clicked her teeth with irritation. ‘Oh, that man! How he gets on my nerves!’.
‘He certainly is rather useless at jumble sales,’ I agreed, ‘but then he’s so good, saintly almost,’ I faltered, for I really had no evidence to support my statement apart from the fact that his habitual dress of cassock and old overcoat seemed to indicate a disregard for the conventions of this world which implied a preoccupation with higher things.
‘Saintly!’ snorted Sister Blatt. ‘I don’t know what’s given you that idea. Just because a man takes Orders in middle age and goes about looking like an old tramp! He was no good in business so he went into the Church – that’s not what we want.’”
Here, for all the force of Sister Blatt’s criticism, in fact I think it’s Mildred’s gentle humanity that comes through so strongly, as it does throughout the novel. Her hesitation and apparent lack of confidence mask a genuine kindness and appreciation of the foibles of human beings.
Barbara Pym’s novels are very much of their age. There are many Anglicans today who’d barely recognise themselves in them. And so much of the world she knew has passed away, though sometimes you can still hear echoes in parish life even today of things that would have been entirely familiar to her. But I do think that the adroit fusion of awareness of human frailty and confidence, or hope, in an essential human goodness which shines through her work has something still relevant for faith’s engagement with the world today.
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