Dutton, 2. 56 pp., $7. Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym. E. P. Dutton, 2. 18 pp., $7. The Bad Sister by Emma Tennant. Coward, Mc. Cann and Geoghegen, 2. Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. Scribner's, 1. 35 pp., $7. In London last year, the Times Literary Supplement asked a number of writers to draw up a list of overrated and underrated writers. By no means a thankless task, but among the sneers that leapt to the page were words of praise, from Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, which served to call attention to Barbara Pym. She had brought out six quiet novels in the Fifties, but had gone unsung, and even, during the eventful late Sixties and after, unpublished. Now she has been sung, and is “the in- thing to read,” according to one British librarian. American readers are hereby offered an example of her early work and of her late. Anglophiles may be promised a treat, but unless she is to be troubled by the kind of higher- philistine condescension which has obscured the reception of Larkin’s poetry in America, other readers will like her almost as much. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” In the Literary Supplement’s parent paper, the Times, a series of advertisements has long been seen—appeals for money on behalf of the Distressed Gentlefolks Aid Association, accompanied by a fine- boned grieving elderly face, as of a Plantagenet on evil days. It was possible to feel, rather as Wilde felt about the death of little Nell, that it would take a heart of stone to accede to these requests, but Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, published in 1. The heroine, Mildred Lathbury, “did part- time work at an organization which helped impoverished gentlewomen, a cause very near to my own heart, as I felt that I was just the kind of person who might one day become one.” Mildred endures the type of suffering which is endured by the well- bred, frugal, plucky spinster. Modern literature has been considerate of victims: but this sort has often been passed over, or punished. Mildred’s distress may be understood both as that of an unmarried woman and as that of a woman who suffers the usual disadvantages of her sex: Philip Larkin has suggested that the men Miss Pym writes about behave worse than the women, and her novels could fairly be regarded as grist to the feminist mill. But the present novel makes much of the vestal Mildred: here is a virgin who is forever “venturing” or “faltering,” sipping tea or sherry, catching the drone of music from a nearby church. Mary’s, is High Anglican to Anglo- Catholic, and is situated in a decayed or, as Anthony Powell once put it, “doomed” quarter near the center of London, around Victoria, a quarter of the forlorn and the genteel, where a herd of stricken deer find pasture. An estranged couple move into the flat next to hers, Helena and Rockingham Napier. Helena is a godless anthropologist and her husband a glamorous, feckless former naval officer, the sort of man, as Larkin notes, who is capable of handing a woman a bunch of chrysanthemums not bought in a shop but picked from his own garden—“dragged up roughly,” says Larkin, with a flash of anger. Helena has started to prefer to her husband a fellow anthropologist, cross and serious Everard Bone.
Meanwhile Julian the vicar, with his biretta, wants to marry a glamorous worldly widow, Allegra Gray. In the fullness of time, Mildred and Everard make friends. These storms in a teacup might seem at first to be due to show that Mildred is a dull and fragile creature who leans on the Church for lack of anything else. ![]() But it is soon apparent that she is not, that she is shrewd and cool and self- possessed and stylish. She is apt to present herself as a lady who knows what other ladies know, and who is addressing a readership no better informed. Julian began to explain to us what an anthropologist was, or I suppose he did, but as it is unlikely that any anthropologist will read this, I can perhaps say that it appeared to be something to do with the study of man and his behavior in society—particularly among “primitive communities,” Julian said. But she is an orphan who is alert to the falsity of much of that compassion. When Julian remarks that Allegra has had a hard life and is an orphan, Mildred is unmoved. It is said of Barbara Pym, as it has been said of other writers, that she is like Jane Austen, but this time at least the comparison needn’t be resented. What is mostly meant by it is that she is a novelist of manners who writes about marriage and marriageability with the unromantic eye of a noticing, “positive” spinster. But the comparison can be taken further. There is a current reading of Jane Austen which holds that she is moved by the romantic attitudes with which she finds fault, and of Miss Pym, too, it can be claimed that she is both unromantic and romantic. The extent to which she is the second can be gauged by the extent to which the narrative, smilingly self- defined as that of a church- crawling “excellent woman,” has in it the voice of the outcast. Women in Distress nychoufdq; 135 videos. Play next; Play now; Damsel in.Mildred’s authentic excellence is partly a matter of her ability to bear, and to take into constructive account, the responsibilities, sorrows, and incitements to self- pity, of such a plight. Excellent Women made me think of Mansfield Park, in which the orphan Fanny lives, under insult, in the grand house of that name and is assailed by the blandishments of the talented but untrustworthy Crawfords, Henry and his sister Mary. The Crawfords come a cropper, and Mary, intelligent and delightful, is severely blamed by the writer for being light- mindedly solicitous of her brother when he is exposed as a sexual delinquent. Fanny does not come a cropper. She is like one of the fortunate foundlings of the romantic and Gothic tradition, who are not absent from Jane Austen’s books. She gets her man, and her Mansfield Park, and her rewards or deserts may be said to include Lionel Trilling’s description of her as embodying the spirit of Christian humility. Mildred’s progress is not very different from Fanny’s. Here, too, Christian humility is assailed by the talented and untrustworthy, and rewarded with a good man, with whom she is to live happily if humbly ever after. He is Mildred’s Rochester, just as the pseudo- orphan Allegra Gray is her vampire: “I saw Mrs. Gray’s face rather too close to mine, her eyes wide open and penetrating, her teeth small and pointed. ![]() Pym’s books—like Excellent Women, one of her best—made me think of Northanger Abbey, whose heroine is bemused by a reading of Gothic novels, and which itself resembles the kind of novel it is laughing at. In A Glass of Blessings, published in 1. Wilmet, a young woman with an unresponsive husband, lacks experience: “I had not had a lover before I married, I had no children, I wasn’t even asked to clean the brasses or arrange the flowers in church.” She yields to “wild imaginings,” which remove her from “reality,” and which concern not only the “baroque horror” of a furniture depository but a possible platonic infidelity. The reference is to the very beautiful poem by Herbert, “The Pulley,” which supplies the novel’s title and epigraph. When God at first made man,Having a glass of blessings standing by; Let us (said he) pour on him all we can: Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie, Contract into a span. Herbert goes on to say that man has been denied the gift of repose: “Let him be rich and weary.” We may be meant to decide that Wilmet has been restless, and romantic, and had to be chastened. But then we might also have decided that she had quite a lot to be restless about. Precious few rewards, desserts, or blessings await the four sufferers in Barbara Pym’s new novel, Quartet in Autumn. Two men and two women, all near retirement, share an office in a huge firm whose business is too boring to mention. One of the men is an expert on the events of the Christian Year. Operated on for cancer, one of the women, Marcia, putters about collecting things and brooding over her surgeon, and then dies. Afterward, the other male colleague opens a drawer in Marcia’s house. To his surprise, it was full of plastic bags of various sizes, all neatly folded and classified by size and type. There was something almost admirable about the arrangement, unexpected and yet just the sort of thing he could imagine Marcia doing. Their faults are neatly classified, but more is made of those of a busybody social worker, who feels uneasy that her social work has been unable to save Marcia from the jaws of death. Marcia is precisely evoked, and so is Letty, whose troubles with a false woman friend, jilted by a babyish clergyman, are turned with Miss Pym’s old skill. But it looks as if the imagination of the victim, of the celibate, which has informed her fiction is less lively here, less hopeful, and the story of these poor things is not a rich one. The blessings poured for the four are such as to make the Herbert poem seem like a painful satire: literature’s poor things are very unfortunate if they prevent their authors, as often happens and as happens here, from conveying that they can ever have had a really good time. Miss Pym’s best books convey an impression altogether remote from this, however, and they are those of a very accomplished writer. Her favorites among contemporary English novelists are lvy Compton- Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Anthony Powell, and Iris Murdoch, but she could rarely be mistaken for any one of these. She may be classed with Betjeman as a poet of High Church attendance. When incense is mentioned, it tends to be as a joke: some classes of the stuff are better bred than others, we are made aware. The odor of sanctity is missing from her books, except as a further joke, but a fragrance as of vegetables and salads, as of cresses, cucumbers, lettuce, Stilton, is not. Her interest in religion is anthropological, skeptical, sardonic; it may also be romantic; whether and in what way it is pious, I can’t be sure. For all I can tell, she may be an “Anglican atheist”: a term of Orwell’s, which has been applied to Larkin.
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