A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym m
In this daily series, our arts critics choose comforting works for these tough times
Barbara Pym’s fans often see her as a novelist for teatime comfort, painting the middling classes in a world where no bombs explode and nothing is irretrievably broken. At one superficial level, such a reading is justified. Her intention is not to shock or subvert; there is nothing nasty in her woodshed. Like Jane Austen, she lets “other pens dwell on guilt and misery” as she limits herself to a narrow social and psychological range. She is a quiet writer, not a noisy one.
None of this demeans her art. Forty years after her death, her stature holds fast, and she has weathered changes of fashion far better than flashier contemporaries such as Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson. I believe she stands with Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Taylor among the finest women novelists of the second half of the 20th century, ranking as a unique chronicler of a certain moment in English middle-class life that passed in the cultural ferment of the Sixties.
A Glass of Blessings is perhaps my favourite, described by Philip Larkin as “the subtlest” of her works. It focuses on a reasonably happily married woman who conceives a misguided fantasy for a charming man who turns out to be homosexual. This delicate theme is handled with poise and wit, without moral judgment: the formal composition is impeccable, the prose style pellucid, and it surprises me that it was so tepidly reviewed on its publication in 1958.
It’s a supreme irony that shortly after writing A Glass of Blessings, Pym fell in unrequited love with just such a gay charmer and returned to the subject in one of her last novels, The Sweet Dove Died.
Chekhov’s short stories inspired her, and it is in his humane, naturalistic tradition that she writes.
She isn’t interested in the extremes of human behaviour or the exceptional personality – one can’t imagine her creating a Jean Brodie. Nor does she have any overt philosophical or ideological impulse. The high church Anglicanism to which she subscribed is only a backdrop, a context: what she understands lies beyond the seven deadly sins and salvation or damnation. There are no dark nights of the soul here, no sublime visions. She inhabits, instead, the greyer emotions of ordinary daily life: resentment, irritation, frustration, jealousy, romantic fantasies, mild boredom, secret disappointment and weary resignation.
What she tells us is always real, and that’s why her novels matter.