Barbara Pym: An Academic Question (1984)

An Academic Question (originally untitled) is what Barbara Pym called her 'Academic Novel' according to Pym's biographer Hazel Holt (A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (1990)), who also edited this novel written in the beginning of the 1970s. This Virago Modern Classics edition, narrated in the first person, is essentially an amalgamated version of Pym's original first-person novel, and a re-write that Holt says Pym wanted to make, er, 'sharp' and 'swinging'.

 

Certainly this is far removed from the earlier novels by Pym that I've read, Some Tame Gazelle and Excellent Women. There are, for instance, no church jumble sales, garden parties, dinners with curates, and above all no mention of (obvious) spinsters; instead, abortion, contraception, extra-marital sex, and student rebellion – the last largely inspired by correspondence from Philip Larkin about Hull University – are on the menu. But does this represent such an enormous departure from Pym's novels?

 

I would argue not. Hazel Holt calls it a 'transitional novel', and that seems a fair assessment of a person apparently trying to adjust to a post-sexual revolution mentality. In the novel, Iris asks Caro Grimstone, the wife of lecturer Alan, what her friend Coco is 'exactly? – I mean, sexually', meaning hetero or homo. In answer, Caro says 'Well, nothing, really', adding:

 

'We've never really talked about it. In any case, are people to be classified as simply as that? Some people just love themselves.'

 

It's clear here that Caro isn't talking about onanism, but rather asexuality, the great unmentionable.

 

In her 2012 Introduction to this edition Kate Saunders says that this might not be a major Pym novel, although I'm not so sure. It would have been very interesting to see the original draft and the updated, 'swinging' version, though – just to make comparisons.

Barbara Pym in Finstock, Oxfordshire

Barn Cottage, Finstock, Oxfordshire.

 

'BARBARA PYM
1913–1980

 

Writer

 

lived here

1972–1980' 

Following Barbara's sister Hilary's retirement from the BBC they bought Barn Cottage in Finstock, actually a converted wheelwright's shop. As Barbara was still working at the International African Institute in London she found cheap accommodation there and rejoined Hilary at weekends until her retirement in 1974. (My information above was gleaned from Hazel Holt's excellent book A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym (1990).)

Holy Trinity, the church the sisters attended. (This is also where T. S. Eliot joined the Anglican Church in a secret ceremony in 1927.)

'BARBARA PYM
WRITER
1913–1980
WORSHIPPED
HERE'

'THIS LECTERN, DEDICATED ON THE 3RD JUNE 1984,
HAS BEEN GIVEN IN MEMORY OF THE WRITER
BARBARA PYM, WHO ORGANISED THE READING OF
THE EPISTLE DURING THE TIME SHE LIVED IN
FINSTOCK, 1972–1980.'

'BARBARA PYM
Writer
2nd June 1913–11th Jan. 1980
HILARY WALTON
née PYM
13th Jan. 1916–7th Feb. 2004'

I didn't know where Pym's grave was, so I asked a couple of elderly locals tending a grave if they knew. They had no idea, although in fairness one of them did know she was a writer.

Links to my other Pym posts:

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Barbara Pym: Some Tame Gazelle (1950)
Barbara Pym: Excellent Women (1952)

Barbara Pym: Some Tame Gazelle (1950)

My second Barbara Pym novel is in fact her first published, although it took many more years in the making, being begun sixteen years previously in 1934, when she was still at Oxford University. Several of her characters contain elements of people she knew at Oxford, and the main two characters, the confirmed fiftysomething spinsters Belinda and Harriet Bede, are a kind of premonition of Barbara and her sister Harriet's life together: they also lived in a village and were deeply steeped in social rituals revolving around the parish church.

As for some of the other inspirations:

– Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve is inspired by Henry Harvey. Pym met Harvey at Oxford and never forgot him: Belinda had 'loved the Archdeacon when she was twenty and [never] found anyone to replace him since'. The narrator adds 'with the years [Belinda's] passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling, more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning'. She admires his wife Agatha, and seems to prefer this marriage from a distance, by proxy.

– Radmila May notes that John Akenside, who died in a riot in Prague but is only mentioned in relation to Count Bianco, was inspired by her father John Barnicot, who incidentally wasn't killed in Prague, but had a Balkan connection as Akenside does, and whose physical description tallies.

– Count Bianco was inspired by Robert Weiss: May comments that Weiss was famous for unrequited love, and never forgave Pym for the description of Bianco repeatedly asking Harriet to marry him.

Pym's spinster sisters want not to get married far more than they want to get married, although there is something – which is surely deliberate, as if Pym is laughing at herself – ridiculous (partly because paradoxical) in their situation, in their being jealous about men they can't have and don't want. The whole thing seems to be a game that the women win (or at least don't lose), and usually, I think, the men are seen in a more ridiculous light than the women: Nathaniel Mold is upset by Harriet turning him down and resorts to drink; Bishop Theodore Grote is eager to be married, although he seems not too concerned to whom; and Henry delights in talking over people's heads and repeatedly quotes the same lines from Edward Young, as if he were a young schoolboy scoring points in a test of knowledge.

Literary quotations seem to be a prominent feature of Pym's novels, and they are often used to make an important generalising principal. In yet another humorous observation on spinsterhood, the narrator, speaking through Harriet and Belinda's thoughts, concludes:

'[W]ho would change a comfortable life of spinsterhood in a country parish, which always had its pale curate to be cherished, for the unknown trials of matrimony?'

 

Harriet remembers her sister

'saying something about people preferring to bear those ills they had, rather than flying to others that they knew not of'.

This, of course, is a slight misquotation from one of Hamlet's soliloquies, and is most apt: a more prosaic, proverbial rendering would be 'better the devil you know than the devil you don't.'

One of the oddest paragraphs, and one in which the virtual life of the sisters is again highlighted, is when Agatha is leaving for a holiday abroad on her own and the sisters take up 'their posts' at the window well before she is due to leave. They are obviously not only 'very confirmed spinsters', as Harriet later remarks, but confirmed curtain twitchers who love watching people come and go, and Agatha's leaving is something they have 'looked forward to [...] with an almost childish excitement'. Things of interest to them are the emotions shown on the occasion, what Agatha is wearing, how much luggage she has, etc. Self-parody this certainly is, although aren't such actions bound to evoke pity in the reader rather than amusement? Isn't it taking the proxy world of Belinda and Harriet (and by extension Barbara and Hilary) a little too far? Just a thought.

Barbara Pym: Excellent Women (1952)

Barbara Pym's Excellent Women depicts a world that revolves around spinsters, Anglo-Catholic rituals, anthropologists, church jumble sales, correct behaviour, suitable dress, bathroom sharing, and above all tea. As the above sentence may suggest, externally this is a world that has in some respects gone or is disappearing, one in which the church was all-important as a social focus and moral compass, when people had a 'Christian' name as opposed to a first or forename, when pubs were called 'public houses', when people frequently popped in to visit acquaintances and friends without prior arrangement – before the ubiquity of the telephone as a nervous tic, before the cultural anaesthesia of television.

 

Mildred Lathbury, a thirtyish spinster who works part time for the Society for the Care of Gentlewomen, is the protagonist and narrator. Her non-working life is wrapped up in church acivities, although the arrival of the anthropologist Helena Napier and her husband Rockingham, neither of whom are churchgoers and both of whom are very extroverted, soon bring a little colour to Mildred's existence. But perhaps this isn't what she really needs.

Mildred doesn't seem romantically interested in Father Julian Malory, nor in a man with whom she occasionally has lunch: William Caldicote, the priggish brother of her friend Dora. In fact she seems more interested in Rocky, who is of course unavailable because married. And here we perhaps have the crux of the issue: that Mildred may think about marriage from afar, but really isn't interested in it becoming a reality. Like Lolly Willowes in the first half of Sylvia Townsend Warner's novel of the same name, Mildred prefers to live life by proxy. As William tells her:

'We, my dear Mildred, are the observers of life.' In fact they do socially (or maybe more exactly, virtually) what Helena and her colleague Everard Bone do professionally.

Mildred herself says:

'I must not allow myself to have feelings, but must only observe the effects of other people's. [...] [P]erhaps I really enjoyed other people's lives more than my own.'

  

Mildred tells Dora – also a spinster – that there's no one she wants to marry, and Dora replies that she doesn't know anyone either 'at the moment', an expression that the narrator quietly picks up on and considers:

 

'It was a kind of fiction that we had always kept up, this not knowing anyone at the moment that we wanted to marry, as if there had been in the past and would be in the future.'

There certainly are moments of strong drama in the novel, such as Helena walking out on Rocky, or the young widow Alegra breaking off her engagement to Julian, but usually the actions are far more subtle, very understated, although at the same time sometimes apparently minor things (such as a teapot) carry great weight. When for instance Mildred asks Miss Stratham if they need a cup of tea, she interprets the effect of her question on her involving pain, puzzlement, distress, almost anger:

'It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.'

Such a sentence – evidently self-parody – comforted me in the knowledge that Mildred was capable of laughing at herself to such a degree: this is almost absurdist territory. And I can see why Anne Tyler identifies with Pym's work, saying that she 'reminds us of the heartbreaking silliness of everyday life'. I can't wait to read more Pym novels.