VIRAGO
MODERN CLASSICS
541
Barbara Pym
Barbara Pym (1913–1980) was born in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was educated at Huyton College, Liverpool, and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she gained an Honours Degree in English Language and Literature. During the war she served in the WRNS in Britain and Naples. From 1958–1974 she worked as an editorial secretary at the International African Institute. Her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, was published in 1950, and was followed by Excellent Women (1952), Jane and Prudence (1953), Less than Angels (1955), A Glass of Blessings (1958) and No Fond Return of Love (1961).
During the sixties and early seventies her writing suffered a partial eclipse and, discouraged, she concentrated on her work for the International African Institute, from which she retired in 1974 to live in Oxfordshire. A renaissance in her fortunes came in 1977, when both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil chose her as one of the most under-rated novelists of the century. With astonishing speed, she emerged, after sixteen years of obscurity, to almost instant fame and recognition. Quartet in Autumn was published in 1977 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Sweet Dove Died followed in 1978, and A Few Green Leaves was published posthumously. Barbara Pym died in January 1980.
Also by Barbara Pym
Excellent Women
Jane and Prudence
Less than Angels
A Glass of Blessings
No Fond Return of Love
Quartet in Autumn
The Sweet Dove Died
A Few Green Leaves
Crampton Hodnet
An Unsuitable Attachment
An Academic Question
COPYRIGHT
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 9780748131525
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © Barbara Pym 1950
Introduction copyright © Mavis Cheek 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
Contents
Also by Barbara Pym
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
JANE AND PRUDENCE
NO FOND RETURN OF LOVE
OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTHS
A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON
INTRODUCTION
From the opening line of Some Tame Gazelle you are safely and deliciously in Pym Country. ‘The new curate seemed quite a nice young man, but what a pity it was that his combinations showed, tucked carelessly into his socks.’ The curate in question is visiting Belinda and Harriet Bede, unmarried, middle-aged sisters living in the heart of a village parish. Plump Harriet likes to tuck young, pale, thin curates under her substantial wing, while the more circumspect Belinda potters through her life, comfortably loving the Archdeacon from afar.
Harriet is much more flamboyant than her sister, and given to wearing fashionable frocks in which she is well buoyed up by corsets. (Barbara Pym is awfully good at writing about clothes.) These corsets, under constant strain, frequently need mending, and are often to be found thrust beneath a cushion when an unexpected visitor comes to call. Harriet is loved, unrequitedly, by an adoring Italian count who asks for her hand in marriage on a regular basis and which, on a regular basis, is declined. Both seem quite content with this.
Belinda, who little cares for fashion, asks for nothing more than to continue to adore the handsome, self-satisfied Archdeacon from afar, and to loyally support him as he bemoans the heavy workload of his parish duties which, in fact, are mostly absorbed by said pale, young curates. It is Belinda’s task and delight, she feels, to support and explain the Archdeacon’s sermons, which are often of great length, and totally obscure. Here, one of the Pym trademarks is used to great effect – the sharp and skilful quoting of poetry and various texts. Barbara was extraordinarily well-read and could find the perfect quotation for any occasion. Robert ‘Jock’ Liddell wrote that she had ‘a genius for quotation which has probably never been equalled’. When the Archdeacon finishes a particularly long and unintelligible sermon, she has him quote Edward Young (a poet also known for his somewhat lengthy and disconnected texts):
Say dreamers of gay dreams,
How will you weather an eternal night,
Where such expedients fail?
The bored congregation, she says, ‘had been dreaming gay dreams most of the morning … and had only allowed their thoughts to wander when it had passed beyond their comprehension.’
Belinda often compares herself, unfavourably, to Archdeacon Hoccleve’s capable and more literary wife. Agatha is cool, elegant, and unsympathetic. She is the kind of woman who is a glad martyr to her rheumatism, and takes the waters at Karlsbad for her holidays. And she is based on someone Barbara knew and disliked at Oxford. This is another of Barbara Pym’s authorial characteristics: she loved to include real people in her books. Even the sisters, Harriet and Belinda, are loosely based on herself and Hilary, her elder sister. When she began writing Some Tame Gazelle in 1934, at the astonishingly young age of twenty-one, she imagined them both, she said in her diary, ‘as spinsters of fiftyish’.
Barbara was a great one for falling in and out of love as often, and usually as hopelessly, as possible – and a great one for using her experiences in her books. Archdeacon Hoccleve is also based on a real person, an old flame who rejected Barbara at Oxford. One can only wonder on whom the famous librarian, Nathaniel Mold, and the visiting bishop from Africa, Theodore Grote, are based when they make their unsettling and unwelcome visits to each of the sisters in turn. The sense of glee she shows in the writing of these characters is practically palpable. Beware! Thus fall all miscreants in a sharp-eyed novelist’s life – eventually.
High comedy the book may be but perhaps one of her greatest gifts as a novelist is that she puts her own hand up to the frailties and foibles, the affectations and absurdities that her characters contain and endure. As with all the best writers of comedy, she is non-judgemental and, though beady-eyed, she is also sympathetic, particularly in matters of the heart and how foolishly they can make us behave. From the very first she proved herself to be an accomplished novelist of sharply observed comedies of manners where, though life appears to be carrying on calmly and evenly, beneath its façade lie dark undercurrents, hidden desires and unsuitable attachments.
Barbara wrote in her diary that she ‘must work at my novel, that is the only thing there is and the only way to find any happiness at present … I want Liebe but I would be satisfied if my novel could be published.’ That novel was Some Tame Gazelle, and it set the pattern for all the rest.
Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!
After many drafts Some Tame Gazelle was finally published by Jonathan Cape in 1950. Her friend from Oxford, Jock Liddell, who read it in its first incarnation and in its last before she offered it to publishers said, ‘The wonderful thing is that you haven’t spoiled it – it is still the book we knew and loved – and yet it is tidy and shapely, and every blot removed.’
It was received with ecstatic reviews. The Observer said, ‘She creates a small well-bred Eden, but contrives to insert a little old Adam as well.’ The Daily Telegraph wrote, ‘Miss Pym’s sharp fresh fun is all her own’, while the Manchester Guardian called it ‘An enchanting book about village life, but no more to be described than a delicious taste or smell.’ And the Church Times, which might be expected to be a little sour, given the harsh light her books shone upon the life and ways of the clergy, had nothing but praise for it: ‘We needn’t bring Jane Austen into it, but Miss Pym is writing in a great tradition and she knows it.’ Yes, she most certainly does. She knows exactly how to take a small community of folk and make its story timeless, universal and very, very funny.
Barbara went on to publish a further five critically well-received novels before, in 1963, with quite extraordinary lack of foresight, Cape’s Tom Maschler refused to publish her next, An Unsuitable Attachment. Many years later she wrote to Philip Larkin that she and her sister Hilary had invented a pudding which they called ‘a Maschler – a sort of milky jelly’ – which is just the kind of thing that might happen in a Barbara Pym novel.
When Philip Larkin, perhaps Barbara’s greatest fan and champion, discovered that Cape had rejected her, he was outraged at the Maschler decision, writing to her that:
I can’t understand why the publishers are taking this line … it seems a sad state of affairs if such tender, perceptive and intelligent work can’t see the light, just because some tasteless chump thinks it won’t ‘go’ in paperback.
Suffice it to say that when An Unsuitable Attachment did get published, posthumously in 1982, it was received with rave reviews.
But to begin at the beginning … For those readers who have yet to discover Miss Barbara Pym, this debut novel will be full of delights and surprises; for those of us who have read and loved her books for years, this new edition of the first of her novels is a fitting tribute to her brilliant, humorous story-telling and the enduring charm of her writer’s eye. Some Tame Gazelle is still my personal favourite for its sparkling high comedy and its treasury of characters, but rereading the entire canon, ten novels in all, has been pure bliss. She makes me smile, laugh out loud, consider my own foibles and fantasies, and, above all, suffer real regret when I reach the final page. Of how many authors can you honestly say that?
Mavis Cheek
November 2008
Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!
THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY
CHAPTER ONE
The new curate seemed quite a nice young man, but what a pity it was that his combinations showed, tucked carelessly into his socks, when he sat down. Belinda had noticed it when they had met him for the first time at the vicarage last week and had felt quite embarrassed. Perhaps Harriet could say something to him about it. Her blunt jolly manner could carry off these little awkwardnesses much better than Belinda’s timidity. Of course he might think it none of their business, as indeed it was not, but Belinda rather doubted whether he thought at all, if one were to judge by the quality of his first sermon.
‘If only we could get back some of the fervour and eloquence of the seventeenth century in the pulpit today,’ she had said to her sister Harriet, a plump elegant spinster in the middle fifties.
‘Oh, we don’t want that kind of thing here,’ Harriet had said in her downright way, for she had long ago given up all intellectual pursuits, while Belinda, who had never been considered the clever one, still retained some smattering of the culture acquired in her college days. Even now a light would shine in her mild greenish eyes, so decorously hidden behind horn-rimmed spectacles, at the mention of Young’s Night Thoughts or the dear Earl of Rochester’s Poems on Several Occasions.
Neither she nor Harriet had ever married, but Harriet was making her usual fuss over the new curate and was obviously prepared to be quite as silly over him as she had been over his predecessors. She was especially given to cherishing young clergymen, and her frequent excursions to the curates’ lodgings had often given rise to talk, for people did like a bit of gossip, especially about a respectable spinster and church worker like Miss Harriet Bede. There was naturally nothing scandalous about these visits, as she always took with her a newly baked cake, some fresh eggs or fruit – for the poor young men always looked half starved – or even a hand-knitted pullover or pair of socks, begun by her in a burst of enthusiasm and usually finished, more soberly, by Belinda. And then of course she would ask them to supper.
Was it tonight he was coming? Belinda wondered vaguely. It must be tonight, she decided, catching sight of a bowl of exceptionally fine pears on the little table by the window, and expensive bought chrysanthemums in the vases when there were perfectly good Michaelmas daisies in the garden. Dear Harriet, she wasn’t really extravagant, only rather too lavish in her hospitality. The Reverend Edgar Donne was surely a simple young man and would not expect much. Naturally one did not think of the clergy as expecting anything in the way of material luxuries … Belinda paused, for she was remembering the vicar, Archdeacon Hoccleve, and how one couldn’t really say that about him. But then dear Henry was different, in some ways not like a clergyman at all. For although Belinda had loved him faithfully for over thirty years, she sometimes had to admit that he had very few of the obvious virtues that one somehow expected of one’s parish priest. His letter in this month’s parish magazine, announcing the arrival of the new curate, had a peevish and condescending tone that a stranger might have thought not quite the thing for an archdeacon. But the village was used to it.
‘The Reverend Edgar Donne – the name is of course pronounced Dunne – will be with us by the time you read these words’, he wrote. ‘Nobody will be more glad to welcome him than I myself, for whom these last few weeks have been more trying than any of you can possibly imagine. Without a curate it has been impossible for me to take the holiday I so badly need and I have been forced to cancel some of the services because I have not felt equal to taking them, as the ready help I looked for from fellow priests in neighbouring parishes has not been forthcoming…’
Of course that was a dig at the Reverend Edward Plowman, who disliked the Archdeacon so much, and as he had quarrelled with Canon Glover what could he expect? thought Belinda, almost wishing that she were Deaconess Bede and could enter the pulpit herself. But even a deaconess was not permitted to celebrate Holy Communion – it was of course the early services which had been cancelled – whereas in the Nonconformist churches, she believed, women ministers had equal status with men…
‘B’linda!’ Harriet’s impatient voice interrupted her thoughts, ‘it’s nearly seven and Mr Donne will soon be here.’ Harriet appeared in the doorway, wearing only a celanese vest and knickers, as if her actual presence in the room would make Belinda realize more fully how late it was.
‘Why, Harriet, the curtains aren’t drawn,’ exclaimed Belinda in an agitated tone. ‘Anybody might see into the room! And you know I never take as long to get ready as you do.’
‘All the same Mr Donne will probably be punctual,’ said Harriet, ‘and it would be terrible if neither of us was ready. I’ve borrowed your lace scarf, as I must have something to cover up the neck of my green frock. Perhaps it would have been better if I hadn’t tried to alter it to a Vee.’
‘Yes, dear.’ Belinda spoke rather absently, for by now she was occupied with the problem of what she should wear. She hoped that Harriet had not also borrowed her black velvet bridge coat, as she wanted it herself on these late September evenings. But then Harriet was pr
obably too stout for it, although she liked her clothes to fit tightly and always wore an elastic roll-on corset.
In her room Belinda took out her blue marocain, a rather dim dress of the kind known as ‘semi-evening’. Quite good enough for the curate, she decided, though if the Archdeacon had been coming as well she would probably have worn her velvet. She did hope that Harriet wouldn’t put on a lot of lipstick, it was so unsuitable…
At that moment there was a ring at the bell and an agitated call from Harriet.
‘Belinda, you go! I haven’t finished doing my hair.’
‘But surely Emily will go?’ said Belinda. She was wondering whether to wear her little seed-pearl brooch or not.
‘No, Emily can’t go. She’s putting the sauce on the chicken.’
Belinda hurried downstairs without the little brooch. She felt flustered and incomplete.
The figure on the doorstep might have been any of the other curates, except that Mr Donne favoured a rather unfashionably high clerical collar. He doesn’t remember me, thought Belinda, as she replied to his rather puzzled greeting.
‘This is Miss Bede’s house?’ he asked, hesitating on the threshold.
‘Yes, I am Miss Bede,’ said Belinda with simple dignity, ‘but I expect you know my sister better.’
‘Ah, you must be Miss Belinda Bede,’ he announced, triumphant at having placed her. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you from the Archdeacon.’
‘Oh, really? What did he say?’ Belinda tried not to sound too coy and eager.
‘He – er – said you did a lot of good work in the parish,’ replied the curate primly.
‘Oh …’ Belinda could not help feeling disappointed. It made her sound almost unpleasant. If that was what he had really said, of course. It didn’t sound at all like the Archdeacon, who never said the sort of things clergymen ought to say. It was so odd to think of him as being a clergyman at all … Belinda’s thoughts slipped back to her college days when they had been students together. Most odd … and yet there was no sadness or bitterness in her mind as she thought of him. It was obvious that poor Agatha had a very difficult time with him, although by her scheming she had made him an archdeacon. Their cook had told the Bedes’ Emily who had told Harriet that the Archdeacon was very difficult to get up in the mornings, and of course one knew that he always made his curates do the early services which was really rather slack, because it wasn’t as if he were very old or weak in health. And yet he had such charm, even now…