In Praise of Excellent Women

By Martha Duffy

Barbara Pym 's popularity proves that old-fashioned virtues pay

Her career would furnish the plot for a 19th century novel: patience rewarded, prevalence over adversity. In the '50s Barbara Pym was a thriving author of well-made English novels. The Swinging Sixties, which got their early momentum in London, swept her out of style. It was not until 1977, when both Poet Philip Larkin and Biographer Lord David Cecil mentioned her in a Times Literary Supplement survey of unjustly neglected writers, that anyone cared to deal with a Pym manuscript. But Larkin and Cecil, literary mandarins though they were, turned out to have their fingers on the public pulse. Before she died, at 66, more than two years ago, Barbara Pym had again become fashionable. Today all ten of her novels are selling well in hardback and paper editions, especially in the U.S.

Pym's books are about women; her male characters are vague sketches or figures of fun. Most of the women lead marginal lives marked by few crises or triumphs; to get by they must be as frugal with their emotions as they are with their money. Many are "excellent women" --the title of one of Pym's best novels--"who are not for marrying." Shy, fastidious, unconsciously formidable, they wade at the edge of life while others swim into the current that leads to husbands or professional status. In a cherishing, detailed manner, Pym provides her solitaries with a minute but wholly credible world.

Her favorite institution is the Church of England; many of her excellent women live through it, in a round of jumble sales, festivals, parish politics and hopeless crushes on clergymen. If Pym's ecclesiastics tend to be a weak, feckless lot, it is no wonder: they are endlessly cosseted by women. One of her most vibrant characters is Harriet Bede in Some Tame Gazelle, actually an affectionate portrait of the author's sister Hilary. This middle-aged lady is crazy about curates, the younger and more threadbare the better. Any veteran of her bounty--rich food, good sherry, hand-knit woollies--is spoiled for life.

Pym's alternate arena is the world of anthropology. The change is not as abrupt as it appears. For much of her professional life, she edited scholarly publications, and while she had no real interest in the discipline, regarded its practitioners as endlessly amusing. A Few Green Leaves is structured like an anthropological study of a small English village. Less Than Angels is a particularly astringent account of social scientists: when its callous hero Tom cannot decide between an excellent woman and her young rival, he flies off to Africa (no escape there, however: Pym kills him off in the bush). A colleague named Lydgate sits in his study intending to do important work but ends by poring over wine lists.

All this is wry social comedy, marvelous in its authenticity. But there is a harder side to Pym, an acute knowledge of the heart's foolishness, of the forces that isolate and diminish the aging, of the helplessness of the poor and the unlucky to alter the course of their lives. "Distressed gentlewoman" is a phrase that echoes sadly through her writing. The Sweet Dove Died--an exception among her novels, since neither clergymen nor anthropologists figure in it--is about a vain, middle-aged beauty who drives out her tenant, Miss Foxe, an ancient who lugs buckets of paraffin up several flights of stairs to heat her top-floor flat. In Quartet in Autumn, Pym's bleakest and most critically acclaimed book, two women and two men who share an office regard retirement with a collective dread. Their work may be inconsequential and boring, but it is their only real hold on life.

In press releases and reviews, Barbara Pym's life has been summarized in a way that makes her sound very much like an "excellent woman": unmarried, a toiler in scientific fields, a woman who stopped writing when her publisher rejected one of her manuscripts. A Very Private Eye, an autobiography drawn from her diaries to be published next spring, gives a livelier picture. A lawyer's daughter from Shropshire, she lived an intense student life at Oxford in the '30s. Her knowledge of the sad imbalances of love came from several unfortunate affairs. Her first book, Some Tame Gazelle, about middle-aged sisters, was written in 1935 when she was 21 (it was revised and published 15 years later). Already certain she would be a writer, she fashioned the story by imagining her sister and herself 30 years hence. The dolorous silence that supposedly followed her rejection by Publisher Jonathan Cape in 1963 never occurred. She kept on writing, and with British pertinacity, sent manuscripts to more than 20 publishers under a variety of male and female pseudonyms.

Throughout, she was strictly true to what she knew. There are almost no children in her fiction, no politics or worldly intrigue, and very few excursions abroad. Death is only significant in Quartet in Autumn and A Few Green Leaves, which were written after she knew that she had cancer. She also knew, at the end, that she was back in the mainstream. That sense of triumph must have informed the closing words of Quartet in Autumn, in which unaccustomed events "at least . . . made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change." --By Martha Duffy This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.