The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, by Paula Byrne

A N WILSON The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym

Perhaps the most interesting thing about a novelist’s life is what they leave out of their novels.

You’d never guess from reading Barbara Pym’s mild 1950s comedies – of which Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958) are the best – that she had experienced a robustly active sexual life since being a student at Oxford in the 1930s, still less that one of her favourite lovers was a Nazi stormtrooper.

You’d never guess that this gawky Joyce Grenfell among novelists had polished up her schoolgirl German in order better to appreciate speeches by the Führer, and that her summer holidays in the 1930s were spent in the happy (for her) atmosphere of the Third Reich.

The dull, English provincialism in the art and politics of the extreme right makes one realise that she had more in common with her friend – and fan – Philip Larkin than merely the enjoyment of a sort of Ealing Comedies pre-beatles, pre-immigration Britain.

All this is brought out forcefully by this whopper of a biography, some 700 pages long. For reasons that elude your reviewer, Paula Byrne says, ‘It is fitting to imagine her life as a picaresque adventure, with a Fieldingesque narrative.’

Each chapter, of which there are dozens, has an excruciating title such as ‘In Which Things begin to become a little complicated with Rupert’ (an early boyfriend) or ‘In which Our Heroine goes to Germany for the third time and sleeps with her Nazi’.

Also, since Pym (or her sister Hilary, after Barbara’s death) expunged nearly all references to Nazism from the diaries now deposited in the Bodleian Library, Paula Byrne falls back instead, when we are in pre-war Germany, on the memories of the surely very different Unity Mitford.

In common with Paula Byrne, and thousands of others, I used to love Pym’s novels – the better ones, at any rate. In common with Larkin and others, I regarded it as outrageous that, in 1963, ‘trendy’ Tom Maschler, at Jonathan Cape, turned down Pym’s novel An Unsuitable Attachment (published, posthumously, in 1982). But have you tried reading it? It’s feeble stuff. A falling-off indeed.

I do not think she ever got back into her stride, although Byrne makes a strong case for the virtues of the later novels, even including the bitter, nihilistic, little tale The Sweet Dove Died (1978) about the painful, unrequited love Pym felt for a gay man.

The weird thing is she really had one talent as a novelist, which was making comedy out of the plight of respectable single women, usually churchgoers, stuck in dull jobs in the 1950s. Pym treasured a vignette she had discovered in a newspaper at about the time she wrote A Glass of Blessings (1958), of a female civil servant who had been found behind a filing cabinet preparing Brussels sprouts, to save time on cooking her husband’s dinner when she got home.

You’d think that after the war (Pym was in the Wrens), women would have become emancipated fully, and much faster. But there was this strange hiatus, in which they were regarded as ‘excellent women’ but kept firmly down. This is the echt Pym territory.

In his 1952 review of the novel of that name, Betjeman wrote, ‘ Excellent Women is England and thank goodness it is full of them.’ Hmm. Full, that is,

of people who are just as competent and well-educated as the men with whom they work, but who remain church fowl, doing dull jobs, crouching behind filing cabinets peeling sprouts.

You might imagine, given this, that Pym would be screaming, but she never did scream. The anger was intense but it was like an ingrowing old toenail. She was angry when her novels went out of fashion and her publisher, Jonathan Cape, sacked her.

But she never seems to have asked herself why they sacked her, and why the novels had stopped being any good. Like her friend Philip Larkin, she claimed to love ‘the trivial round, the common task’. But she was a nihilist. Her novels, though they are comedies, are also, like his poems – such as Mr Bleaney, about the sad lodger living in a miserable rented room – acceptances of the limitation of things.

Life could be bigger than this? I rather hate them both now! Occasionally, other novelists cross the pages of this doorstopper. ‘Our Heroine’ has tea with Elizabeth Bowen, or one of her gay friends makes the acquaintanceship of Ivy Compton-burnett or Mary Renault, or she has dinner with John Bayley and Iris Murdoch – and you realise this was an era when truly magnificent fiction was being written in English.

Paula Byrne has done a gigantic work of homage to a writer who continues to give pleasure to her fans. The length at which the homage is paid, however, is truly puzzling. A hundred pages pass before Pym has even finished her student life. (The leisurely Byrne quotes in full the oath taken by anyone who joins the Bodleian Library!)

The distinctive Pym oddity is how she converted the bright youthfulness of her undergraduate experience into fuddyduddyism. Her lover Henry Harvey (clearly a rotter) is immediately converted into Archdeacon Hoccleve in Some Tame Gazelle (1950), and Pym herself, a highly sexed, passionate woman, becomes the sexless Belinda Bede, making pastry for the curate.

That is the Pym mystery. The comic result was a handful of charming novels, for which we should be grateful. But the reader perhaps notices what the author of this encomium neglects. The impulse that transformed her youthful self into an embittered old spinster (the dated word is apt) was the negation not only of life, but of art. We end the long journey yearning for Carlyle’s ‘Everlasting Yea’!

Byrne concludes that Pym is one of ‘the great writers of the human heart’. She isn’t. Like Arnold in Auden’s sonnet, she thrust her gift in prison and it died.