The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
More personalities than hats
Barbara Pym was a 20th-century Austen – and a headache for biographers
THE ADVENTURES OF
MISS BARBARA PYM by Paula Byrne
686pp, William Collins, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £14.99
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“If only someone would have the courage to be unfashionable,” wrote Barbara Pym to the poet Philip Larkin in 1969. At this point Pym, who had made her name with several spry chronicles of middle-class life, with its weak and watery curates and hesitant spinsters, was deeply unfashionable herself. She had been dropped by her publisher, and was contemplating a late middle age in obscurity, dutifully bound to an abstruse-sounding job at the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. Eight years later, she enjoyed an annus mirabilis, which included a Booker nomination. Since her death from cancer in 1980, her stock has continued to rise, and she is now considered one of Britain’s greatest postwar novelists. Comparisons to Austen are not unreasonable.
Those of us who adore her wise, socially piquant novels with their peculiarly English sense of failure such as A Glass of Blessings and Some Tame Gazelle are inclined to imagine her life to be similar to that
of her characters; darning socks or fretting over the chicken fricassée on an eternal autumn Saturday. Like Mildred in Excellent Women, we think Pym expects “so little of herself that it is almost sad”.
Paula Byrne’s new book confirms that Pym had a racier existence (at least until her mid-30s). We are told of the happy, confident child of a Shropshire solicitor who gets into Oxford, where dashing male undergraduates beat a path to her door. Amid some fairly heavyhanded analysis of Pym’s emotional character, the incidental detail is hilarious. With one early crush, Rupert Gleadow (“the best kiss on record”), we hear how he takes a bath while she sits in the airing cupboard reciting Dryden.
The novelist created a headache for the ardent biographer, tearing up passages of her diary which were too painful (or perhaps too shocking) to be preserved. She also invented alter egos, such as the elegant Pymska, when the mood took her. One feels the real Pym tried on different personalities like new hats, and a certain amount of jejune faddiness accounts for some of the more shocking passages, where Pym, obsessed with Hitler, travels to 1930s Germany and starts mooning over Nazis.
If you adore the sound judgment implicit in her fiction, you might baulk at such moments. But the second half of the book sees Byrne gain a tighter control of her subject, and Pym elicits much greater sympathy. Disappointment, particularly of the romantic kind, seems to calcify, and little nuggets such as the sight of Pym feeling mousy next to the novelist Mary Renault, who is bedecked in gold lamé, are both hilarious and heartbreaking. Still, there are gaps. Pym, we are told, got on very well with all sorts of women, but the female friendships mentioned (particularly with her sister Hilary) are frustratingly shadowy. While Byrne is occasionally opaque about biographical detail, she is beautifully savvy about her subject’s fiction. As biography, then, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym sometimes falls short of expectation, but as a manifesto for her genius, it is gloriously persuasive.