Frequent smiles at
Pym's No. 1 Francis King CRAMPTON HOD N ET by Barbara Pym
Macmillan, f8.95
If, like E. M. Forster with Maurice, a novelist suppresses one of his works be- cause its time seems not yet to have come, a literary executor may feel some confi- dence in eventually issuing it. But if, like Barbara Pym with her Crampton Hodnet, a novelist suppresses a work because its time seems already to have passed, then a literary executor may well feel wary.
However, although one could not main- tain that Crampton Hodnet is either the best of Oxford novels or the best of Pym novels, the author's reasons for putting it aside are as mysterious as those of pub- lishers for rejecting better Pym novels composed far later. In her brief introduc- tion, Barbara Pym's literary executor, Hazel Holt, writes that 'Everyone who has read the manuscript has laughed out loud — even in the Bodleian.' I must confess that I did not myself laugh out loud—even in bed, where I do much of my laughing. But I smiled frequently at the delicate, teasing artistry of scene after scene.
Much that happens in this book is what happens in other Pym novels, and many of the characters are little different from other Pym characters. As Hazel Holt points out, 75 year-old Miss Doggett, with her fearsome hats — one is trimmed with 'a whole covey of cyclamen-coloured birds' — and her dry, sensible companion, 36- year-old Miss Morrow, are to be encoun- tered again, drawn with a keener irony, in Jane and Prudence. So, too, the book is twitteringly full of the kind of men so often portrayed by this author with a mingling of exasperation, tolerance and affection. Some, like gossipy Edward Killigrew, who works in the Bodleian and lives with his fierce, Teutonic, octogenarian mother, are wholly sexless. Some, like the undergradu- ates Gabriel and Michael, who give the impression of constantly speaking in unison, can only be described, since the type itself is now outdated, by that out- dated word 'pansy'. Some, like the aging don Francis Cleveland, who makes a feebly abortive attempt to spend a weekend in Paris with one of his girl students, or the undergraduate Simon, more interested in becoming Prime Minister than falling in love, though certainly she-ites, are nonetheless the sexual equivalents of 240- volt kettles plugged into 110-volt sockets — they are doomed never really to come to the boil. Inevitably, the book contains not merely a vicar and his wife — with, of course, a garden fête — but also the kind of self-regarding young curate over whom, in any Pym novel, the women all swoon and gush. This curate, Mr Latimer, becomes the lodger of Miss Doggett in her dank. North Oxford house, Leamington Lodge, and in that capacity not merely reduces her to girlish skittishness but also persuades himself that Miss Morrow is the woman whom he ought to marry — a view that sardonic Miss Morrow does not share.
The key to the novel lies in the authorial comment, 'Miss Morrow had often noticed that the clever people were inclined to be fond of spiteful gossip and intrigue.' When Mr Latimer becomes 'interested' in Miss Morrow — even, indeed, before it — he and she find themselves the victims of constant observation and comment. In consequence, when he misses Evensong because the two of them have become lost on a walk over Shotover, he prefers to invent a visit to a Bunbury-like 'Vicar of Crampton Hodnet' — hence the title of the novel — rather than tell the innocent truth. Similarly, nothing that happens between Francis Cleveland and his pupil, Barbara Bird, fails to be noticed and then passed from one North Oxford drawing-room to another. It is, in fact, in the repeated coincidences that enable the other charac- ters to keep tabs on each of these couples, that the plot of this novel becomes uncom- fortably artificial.
In recent years, reviewers have tended to refer to Jane Austen when writing of Barbara Pym. But it is the far different spectre of Ivy Compton-Burnett that this novel vividly, if obliquely, evokes. In this context it should be remembered that the best critical study of Compton-Burnett was written by that cruelly neglected novelist Robert Liddell, and that Liddell, a close friend of Pym's, was the person to whom she despatched Crampton Hodnet for his verdict as soon as it was completed. The opening of one chapter of this book might well be the opening of any Compton- Burnett novel: "'Well, this is a cosy sight," said Francis Cleveland, coming into the drawing-room on a cold December afternoon. "What are you doing?"' The reply that he receives from his daughter might also come from a Compton-Burnett character: "I know what you're doing. You're keeping the fire from me." '(Peo- ple keeping the fire from each other is a recurrent source of ill-feeling in the works of Compton-Burnett). Again: '"You are lucky, Mrs Waddell, in hav- ing a husband who is something more than just a husband," said Francis Cleveland. "I think it's really quite enough for a husband to be just that," said Mrs Wad- dell. "It's certainly a whole-time job, isn't it?" ' In such passages it is as if a jolly, humorous young woman, her high, clear voice imitating the reverberant utterances of the high priestess, were serving up at a vicarage tea-table the offerings from a pagan altar.
Since this is a youthful novel, composed in the years 1939-40, it is more high- spirited than the rest of the Pym oeuvre; but nonetheless it too has an underlying melancholy. Miss Morrow, with whom one guesses that Pym felt more sympathy than with any other of her characters, muses at one moment: 'What person could possibly be as comforting as one's bed?'; and even the youthful, glamorous Barbara regards love returned and fulfilled as love inevitably dissipated and perhaps even soiled.
The book eerily evokes a vanished world, in which a woman guiltily rouges her cheeks and scents herself with Parma Violet, in which lovers no less guiltily have assignations in a Lyons Corner House, in which undergraduates invariably have 'Mr' placed before their surnames, and in which an action for breach of promise can almost be precipitated by a young curate parading with a young woman before a window of Waring and Gillow, looking at dining- room suites. This world is one of people too small to contain the emotions that seem about to overwhelm them, of sensi- bility constantly being held in check by sense, and a rueful, resigned acceptance of the trivial and humdrum. Under all the rattle of the fun, there is always a plangent note of sadness.
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