- [I read this 1977 novel in two sections, writing about each half of the book in turn. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the novel.]
17 May 2024
Chapters 1-12 (of 24)
Barbara Pym has written a realistic-seeming novel about four characters whose lives are as empty and schematically presented as those in a play by Samuel Beckett. It’s an odd combination of approaches, and at the half-way point I’m still trying to come to terms with it. This is the London of the 1970s, kind of. There’s a public library visited by the four characters, separately, in Chapter 1. There are supermarkets, price inflation, seedy bedsits and the rest. We are invited as readers to find it all recognisable and dull.
But of all the books I’ve read in the last fifteen years, the only one that comes close to this one isn’t a novel at all, but a tongue-in-cheek anthropological study by Kate Fox, Watching the English. That book doesn’t have characters, but exemplars of typically English behaviour patterns. How do the English queue? How do they speak to one another—or not speak at all—in situations where they accidentally share a social space like a shop or a bus? Kate Fox describes scenarios like these, and commentates on them. Barbara Pym has similar ones take place, and presents us not with a commentary, but with one of the characters’ thoughts about how they are negotiating it: this, we can be perfectly sure of—and Fox confirmed it for us 25 years later—is what the English are like.
The four characters, all approaching retirement age, work in an office together. It’s a Watching the English—or, now I think of it, a watching an English sitcom—scenario. Having known each other for years, they know almost nothing of each other’s lives. The meaninglessness of the work they do—it’s typical of this novel that none of them ever does any work that we witness—is more than just an impression we gather over time. The (acting) deputy boss confirms it in his speech at the half-hearted lunchtime staff get-together convened for the two women on their retirement. The same deputy boss has the thought that the women do not need to be replaced—and nor will the men be when they reach retirement age. In other words, this isn’t the real world at all. It’s a ‘what if?’ scenario as artificial as Beckett’s Happy Days or, now I think of it, Kobe’s The Woman of the Dunes.
Is it a circle of hell, one in which the four characters are eternally trapped? Certainly—and what it is that imprisons our hapless four is the narrowness of their own outlooks. They are all different, but in this they are all the same. They have all found more or less viable ways to get through their lonely, single lives, and they all either avoid, or find themselves deflecting, any new opportunity for social engagement. We see this for the first time with Letty in Chapter 1, when she wishes she had taken the opportunity to speak to another woman in the shop queue….
Like the other main characters, Letty is a particular type. As her new landlady discovers when she looks in her room while Letty is at work, she is neat, clean and ultra-conventional. She has almost no worldly goods beyond a few sets of neat clothes suitable for the office, an old-fashioned poetry anthology or two, her novels from the library—the landlady dislikes novels, so her opinion of Letty is not improved—and… that’s about it. She has no interest in what London has to offer culturally, had expected to share the country cottage owned by her childhood friend, now widowed—until the friend suddenly meets a marriageable (slightly suspect-sounding) new vicar, so she now expects to spend the rest of her life on her own.
Marcia, the other victim of retirement in Chapter 12, I think, is a different type. She is even less sociable than Letty, actively pushing back other people’s attempts to engage with her and indulging in a kind of negative confirmation bias about everybody else’s motives and, basically, their value as human beings. When Letty is looking for a new room after her current landlord sells on to—the horror!—a Nigerian lay preacher, Marcia is persuaded by discovering the wrong kind of milk bottle in her collection, one given to her in kindness by Letty, that life with another woman in the house she inherited from her mother simply wouldn’t be possible.
Are the two men any better? First there’s Norman, who definitely isn’t. He rents a tiny bedsit and lives on tinned food and white bread, whose rising prices give him plenty to grumble about. His default tone is an unimaginative kind of half-sarcastic banter, laced with faux-jaunty phrases whose artificiality Barbara Pym highlights by placing them in inverted commas. This man doesn’t seem to have an original thought in his head—which doesn’t stop him thinking anyway, reaching no useful conclusions about anything. As an automatic-seeming act of charity he pays hospital visits to the husband of his now dead sister, and the brother-in-law wishes he wouldn’t.
And then there’s Edwin, busy enough outside office hours with his work for the church in general and for his good friend ‘Father G’ in particular. This is a High Church world, but Edwin is willing to slum it in other churches when, for instance, they hare having their special ‘patronal’ celebrations on their saints’ days. His social calendar, if it can be called that—it can’t—is defined by that of the church year. The others in the office see this as a strange, if harmless, eccentricity. And it puts him in contact with a group of ladies he can pressurise into offering Letty a room. But is Edwin any more rounded than the other three? He was married once, and has grandchildren—but naturally, being a protagonist in this particular universe, he is very happy not to stay beyond Boxing Day morning with his son’s family, finding the whole Christmas experience ‘draining.’ The other three try to ignore Christmas altogether.
And that’s it. Barbara Pym writes a kind of social comedy that isn’t designed to be funny, or even particularly engaging. She has an ear for phrases and familiar patterns of thought as precise as that of a comic writer like Victoria Wood, but the little conversations or streams of thought we are presented with are as barren as poor Winnie’s in Happy Days. The title would have suited this novel, if Becket hadn’t already claimed it for his play.
Chapters 13-24—to the end
Same. As in a Becket play, nothing happens that anyone would pretend is of any consequence, including the death of one of the characters. Does it matter which? As Norman watches the coffin containing the remains of Marcia—for it is she—moving towards to the crematorium furnace, he muses on the inevitability of death. Not in any profound or surprising way, of course, but one that lets Pym continue to nibble away at the mortality theme.
Mortality. Unusually for people in their sixties, none of the characters appears to have thought about it. And yet it’s all around them. Edwin’s wife Priscilla died some unspecified time ago, as did both Marcia’s mother and her lovely cat Snowy. After a few weeks or months of retirement, Marcia has become unhinged enough to go seeking the cat’s grave in her jungle-like garden. She can’t find it, but the neighbours wonder what she’s doing with a heavy spade. And what’s with all the milk-bottles in the shed? The other dead are Norman’s sister, whose death makes him wonder occasionally why he keeps up the connection with his brother-in-law, and Letty’s friend Marjorie’s first husband—whose death has led to the more conventionally sociable Marjorie to offer to share her cottage.
Are you getting the picture? One of the most gruesome lines in a Becket play is Pozzo’s in Waiting for Godot. ‘They give birth astride of a grave. The light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ In a Barbara Pym novel they retire into a grave, it seems. At least Marcia does, and there’s nothing in the faux-optimistic final line in the novel to dispel this truth. Letty, who speaks the line, needs to have a serious chat with Pozzo. Only Edwin seems to have a view—and it doesn’t concern his own death. Responding to Marcia’s, a few days after he had been at Marcia’s house when she was discovered, unconscious, he surprises a hospital chaplain with his sang-froid. [quote] The novel isn’t long enough for us to find out whether he will approach his own final moments with such equanimity.
Have I written enough about this most unengaging of novels? (I don’t mean it’s a difficult read—Pym’s deftness with the social non-comedy allows it to glide along nicely—but there’s nothing in any of the characters to engage a moment of our interest or compassion.) Marcia gives up eating, apparently from the first day of her retirement. We don’t know whether this is a symptom of her cancer returning, or of her general battiness. She would rather hoard tins and bottles and plastic bags than put any of them to use. When she dies, she leaves the house to Norman, for no reason that he can understand beyond their habit of having shared economy tins of instant coffee at the office. Go figure. Or don’t.
Umm…. Marjorie’s engagement to the dodgy-seeming vicar ends, when he turns his affections to another woman who likes to look after him with his favourite food and wine. Letty can leave her new lodgings at Mrs Pope’s, but they have reached a modus vivendi involving watching TV together, and she isn’t sure she wants to live in the country now. (And what is it with names in this novel? The imperious Mrs Pope, the consultant surgeon Marcia carries a torch for, the all-powerful Mr Strong?) Norman decides to sell Marcia’s house, but has no plans what to do with the money. Edwin… carries on being Edwin. Will he see more of Letty if she doesn’t move to the country? Do we care?
No, we don’t. But we know Letty’s infinite possibilities (?) are only going to end up in exactly the same place as Marcia. Thank goodness it will soon be night once more.
We can read it for you wholesale 