Interest in the work of Barbara Pym was recently stimulated when several writers independently named her as Britain’s most unjustly neglected living novelist. The two books now published in the United States—Excellent Women, first issued in England in 1952, and Quartet in Autumn, a new work—are in my opinion her very best so far. Her candid, penetrating humanity can be disconcerting, like a quiet, strong, perceiving presence in a busy room. Similarly, her wit forms an undercurrent of realization. Her distinctive style, while quite her own, belongs to an English tradition that in painting would include Gwen John, in literature Charlotte Mew: a stillness vibrant with a piercing sense of human frailty.
George Eliot, in her
Scenes of Clerical Life, urges us “to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”
1 It is to this tragicomedy that Barbara Pym’s talent is directed, and her
Quartet in Autumn builds to a stronger pathos than her previous books. Four office colleagues—two male, two female—reach retirement age and face the slim pickings of pensioned obscurity. None has much in the way of inner or outer resources; and each has a fair measure of undistinguished eccentricity, developed throughout a doggedly parochial life. The extent to which change is intolerable to them dictates their diverse lonely fates. Among modern incongruities, their timid or rigid virtues are extinguished, along with an entire and helpless past, before our eyes.
Quartet in Autumn moves within a smaller compass than Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, which treats a similar theme; and Miss Pym is poignant, where Mrs. Spark is masterly. But this is fine, durable stuff, an originality that, however you approach it, gives back the truth.
Excellent Women is so entirely delightful that its tremor of pain takes the reader unaware. (As Miss Pym would say, “It was rather sad, really.”
2) The novel’s narrator is a woman in her thirties, pious, comely, and kind, whose willingness merely to assist at other people’s lives is taken for granted by her friends, and very nearly by herself. Here too an English dread of change acts as a brake on existence, let alone passion. (Transferred to a new room in a government office, one character laments: “Different pigeons come to the windows.”
3) The heroine’s very worth practically ensures that she will be overlooked—a risk that Miss Pym herself has fearlessly run and triumphed over with the excellence of these two books.