Barbara Pym was never just a cosy writer. She could be barbed and sour — and seriously, hilariously funny. Kate Saunders, in her introduction to Pym’s last novel, explains how
‘Rather to my surprise,’ Barbara Pym wrote to her friend Philip Larkin in 1971, ‘I have nearly finished the first draft of another novel about a provincial university told by the youngish wife of a lecturer. It was supposed to be a sort of Margaret Drabble effort, but of course it hasn’t turned out like that at all.’
The novel was An Academic Question — witty, sharp, light as a syllabub, nothing like anything by Margaret Drabble and with a cast of typically Pym-like English eccentrics. There is Kitty Jeffreys, who commanded an army of servants on a Caribbean island until the locals unfeelingly elected an all-black government and forced her into exile. Her son, Coco, is a fastidious bachelor with a passion for gossip; her sister, Dolly, runs a ramshackle secondhand bookshop and obsessively tends hedgehogs.
And these are just the minor characters. In the foreground are the narrator, Caro Grimstone, and her ambitious anthropologist husband, Alan. Caro has a four-year-old daughter and a Swedish au pair, and is longing to find a proper role for herself before the boredom drives her crazy. Other academic wives are ‘helpmeets’ who type or index their husband’s publications and are thanked in the acknowledgments, but Alan does his own typing and is secretive about his work — and he spends a worrying amount of time with his glamorous colleague, Iris Horniblow.
An Academic Question may not be archetypal Pym (no clergymen or ‘drearily splendid’ spinsters), but it couldn’t have been written by anyone else. The freshness, wit and general good nature of this book are all the more remarkable because Pym wrote it without any real hope of getting it published, right in the middle of her 15 years in literary outer darkness.
By the time she finished the first draft in 1971, the novels Pym had produced throughout the 1950s had fallen deeply out of fashion. Despite her loyal readership and history of decent sales, she had not been published for years, and was beginning to think she would never get back into print. ‘It is a wonder to me now,’ she wrote sadly in 1970, ‘that I ever published anything.’
Even with no hope of being published, however, Pym could not stop being a novelist. As she wrote in her diary, ‘It seems unnatural not to be writing bits for novels in one’s notebook.’ She couldn’t sit in a café or walk down a street without putting down some detail that delighted her, such as a man eating his sandwiches with a knife and fork. ‘Oh why can’t I write things like that any more — why is this kind of thing no longer acceptable?’
It’s a famous story now, with a famous happy ending. In 1977 the Times Literary Supplement asked various distinguished writers and critics to name the most underrated writer of the 20th century, and both Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil chose Barbara Pym. The time was suddenly ripe for her rediscovery, and when Pym’s novels were reissued, she found herself a celebrity and a bestseller. In the short time between her rebirth as a published writer and her death in 1980 she produced superb new novels: Quartet in Autumn (shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize), The Sweet Dove Died (1978) and A Few Green Leaves (1980). An Academic Question didn’t appear until 1986. Shortly after finishing the first draft, Pym had to deal with the major distraction of treatment for breast cancer, and when she took up the story again she had lost heart. Hazel Holt, her friend and literary executor, writes:
This draft was, she felt, too ‘cosy’ to have any chance of being published … so she wrote another version … attempting to make the whole thing more ‘sharp’ and ‘swinging’. But she was writing against the grain.
Well, yes — and I have to admit that sometimes it shows. Pym can’t really write convincingly about motherhood, marriage or sexual politics, and in no sense can she be said to ‘swing’ (the bare idea is heresy). This final version of the novel is Holt’s artful amalgamation of all the available drafts and notes. It is not Pym’s masterpiece, but it is filled with authentic Pym wisdom and irony, and is gloriously entertaining.
Caro, the heroine, is a well-meaning young woman, only rather naive and too fond of looking on the bright side. Her favourite word is ‘cosy’; she does her best to explain away any kind of friction. ‘Oh, Caro,’ Alan complains, ‘why will you always try to make everything sound so cosy?’ ‘Cosy’ is a word some people associate with Barbara Pym.
She writes about a middle-class world that is familiar, comical and essentially safe. Pym is not E. F. Benson or Wodehouse, however, and her tidy suburban gardens usually contain a serpent or two — by the end of An Academic Question, Caro will have seen several of her cosiest assumptions shot down in flames. Her ‘adequate’ husband will reveal an unknown side of his character, and even her prosaic mother has a bombshell to drop.
This is mainly a comic novel, but I never like to see Pym’s brand of comic writing filed away under words like ‘gentle’, ‘quiet’ and ‘charming’. She can be all these things, but she can also be barbed and sour; as pitilessly downbeat as Anita Brookner on a bad day. And she can be seriously, hilariously funny — no other novelist has celebrated our national silliness with such exuberance.
All her admirers have their favourite moments of Pym comedy and I can’t resist listing some of mine. In Excellent Women (1952) there is a ludicrous argument about hollyhock chintz. In A Glass of Blessings (1958), a discussion about the problems of working women includes this Dickensian gem: ‘I read in the paper the other day of a woman civil servant who was discovered preparing Brussels sprouts behind a filing cabinet’. I can never think of Some Tame Gazelle (1950) without seeing the curate with his combinations tucked carelessly into his socks, and in this novel I love Dolly mourning for a favourite hedgehog, ‘my golden Maeve, the ancient Irish queen’, while Caro is trying to talk about adultery.
An Academic Question may not be major Pym, but reading it is a major pleasure. Watch out for her Hitchcock moment, when she makes a personal appearance with her sister, Hilary:
Two women who had just retired from jobs in London came to lunch. They were rather nice, spinster sisters … Their lives were busy in an admirable way … They must have loved in their time, perhaps loved and lost and come through it unscathed.
This is how Barbara Pym saw herself at the time, and the picture seems to please her. She liked to describe herself as ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’. Thank goodness it wasn’t true.
Copyright © Kate Saunders 2012. Introduction to An Academic Question by Barbara Pym (Virago, £8.99), to be reviewed by Margaret Drabble in these pages next month.
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