Prying is a pleasure
Francis King
A MIND AT EASE: BARBARA PYM AND HER NOVELS by Robert Liddell
Peter Owen, .£13.95, pp.143
Robert Liddell, now in his 81st year, was a close friend of four of the most accomplished women novelists of our times: Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym and Olivia Manning. With this book, he has now written about the first three of this quartet, but since he clearly sets great store by decorum, discre- tion and loyalty, it is unlikely, I should guess, that Olivia Manning will ever be- come his subject. This is sad, since a comparison between the life of the `Pring- les' as it is recounted in the two trilogies and as Liddell saw it actually being lived in Greece and Egypt, would be both piquant and hilarious.
Although this book is subtitled 'Barbara Pym and Her Novels', Liddell's old- fashioned principles have ensured that there is far more in it about the novels than about their author. Indeed, the first chap- ter is the only one in which Liddell is prepared to discourse at length about the facts of Pym's life, rather than about her fiction. The year is 1932 and Barbara Pym, a first-year undergraduate of St Hilda's College, is 'a cheerful, romantic, outgoing girl of just 19, playfully flirtatious,' whose interest in men is 'keen but not obsessive.' The man in whom she is chiefly interested — the relationship setting the pattern for many that are to follow both in her life and in her books — is a second-year under- graduate from Christ Church, Henry Har- vey, whom I myself was later to come to know as a colleague in the British Council. Pym called him 'Lorenzo' — I always assumed because of a resemblance to D. H. Lawrence but actually, according to Liddell, in reference either to Keats's 'The Pot of Basil' or to Young's 'Night Thoughts'.
Fascinatingly, Liddell shows how it was out of her thwarted passion for Harvey that Pym came to write her first novel Some Tame Gazelle, published in 1950. We know, from Pym's diaries, that she con- sumed Yeastvite as a remedium amoris. But, as Liddell rightly points out, it was a remedium amoris even more effective to fictionalise herself, Harvey and their circle of friends as she imagined that they would become after the passage of some 30 years. She and her sister — now called Belinda and Harriet, instead of Barbara and Hilary — are spinsters in their fifties. Henry Harvey is Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve — 'a gloriously comic character', Liddell rightly notes, afflicted with a solipsism which impels him now to weary his parishioners with inordinately long ser- mons and now to expect his wife to minister to his every want. Liddell himself has been elevated, under the name of Nicholas Parnell, to the rank of Bodley's librarian. Another character has 'the blunt speech and bruiser-like appearance' but not the 'lovely speaking voice' of Honor Tracy.
Liddell divides Pym's work into two parts. On the one hand there are the six novels which appeared between 1950 and 1961 — 'the canon', he calls them; on the other hand, there are the three novels, more sombre in mood and more precise in technique, which followed her emergence from the wilderness in 1977. Of the re- maining two posthumously published novels, Crampton Hodnet and An Unsuit- able Attachment, Liddell declares: 'I be- lieve that she would finally have rejected them, and that she would have done well to do so.' This seems to me unduly severe. Pym may herself have written better novels, but writers no less highly regarded have written worse.
Liddell correctly sees Pym's novels as class-conscious but not snobbish. The viewpoint is that of the sort of English gentlewoman who, having grown up be- tween the Wars, at once places a man below the Great Divide if, like handsome Fabian Driver in Jane and Prudence, he goes out for a country walk carrying an umbrella. Liddell also rightly detects a certain monotony in Pym's view of men as invariably exploiting their womanfolk. Af- ter all, as both life and fiction often show us, women are equally capable of exploit- ing their menfolk. Oddly, Liddell writes of Pym that 'she has caused some laughter and many smiles, but has made no one shed a tear.' I am not one to cry over books; but were I so, I should certainly have cried over Quartet in Autumn, so profoundly depressing in its picture of four narrow, parched lives as they move to- wards their close.
Pym worked for many years on an anthropological journal. Like Dulcie Mainwaring's in No Fond Return of Love, her inquisitiveness is often that of the anthropologist, applied not to an alien society but to her own. Here, Liddell draws an interesting parallel with Mass Observation, at once a sport and a science of the Thirties. 'Collective habits and social behaviour are our field of enquiry,' de- clared the founders; adding that the resear- ches of their investigators were based on 'a passionate concern for "trifles", unconsi- dered by others, for the sights and smells of ordinary life going on irrespective of politi- cians and generals.' But if Pym's diaries reveal something of the anthropologist and something of the Mass Observer, they also reveal something of the detective. For her, as for Dulcie, prying is a pleasure.
The one defect of this brief but admir- able study, is Liddell's combativeness in contradicting and even deriding other Pym scholars, usually American and usually contributors to a volume of essays of limited circulation, The Life and Work of Barbara Pym (edited by Dale Salwak). There is some point in taking on antagon- ists of distinction; but why bother with the opinions of people whose names (which Liddell often does not give) may be un- known even to other writers? It is as though the indignation aroused by such opinions had been the fuel which got Liddell's mind and pen moving.
What is most admirable about Liddell's book is that, unlike so many of Pym's fans, he is modest and judicious in his claims. She is no Jane Austen, she is no Ivy Compton-Burnett; but she is one of those writers who effortlessly exert a spell. What is its secret? Liddell's answer to that question is that 'Her books often seem to come to us like gifts of nature, like the air we breathe or the water we drink (but purer and more wholesome).'
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