by Barbara Pym
PENGUIN CLASSICS
EXCELLENT WOMEN
BARBARA MARY CRAMPTON PYM (1913–1980) was a British novelist best known for her series of satirical novels on English middle-class society. A graduate of St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, Pym published the first of her nine novels, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1950, followed by five more books. Despite this early success and continuing popularity, Pym went unpublished from 1963 to 1977. Her work was rediscovered after a famous article in the Times Literary Supplement in which two prominent names, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, nominated Pym as the most underrated writer of the century. Her comeback novel, Quartet in Autumn, was nominated for the Booker Prize.
A. N. WILSON was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby School and New College, Oxford. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has held a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism, winning prizes for much of his work. His most recent work of nonfiction is After the Victorians and, of fiction, A Jealous Ghost. He lives in London.
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First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1952
First published in the United States of America by E. P. Dutton 1978
This edition with an introduction by A.N. Wilson published in Penguin Books 2006
Copyright Barbara Pym, 1952
Introduction copyright © A. N. Wilson, 2005
All rights reserved
Mr. Wilson’s introduction was published in The Folio Society’s edition of Excellent Women.
Reprinted by arrangement with The Folio Society Limited, London.
Publisher’s Note
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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To My Sister
Contents
Introduction by A. N. WILSON
EXCELLENT WOMEN
Introduction
The conventional romantic novel ends with marriage. ‘Reader, I married him . . .’ ‘She gloried in being a sailor’s wife . . .’ ‘ . . . Agnes laid her head upon my breast, and wept; and I wept with her, though we were so happy.’ Is this not how the form of the novel demanded that the story should end, even when, as in the case of the first two books quoted (Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Persuasion by Jane Austen), the heroine was either too plain or too old for the conventions of romantic fiction to consider her marriageable? That, indeed, remains the beguiling narcotic of fantasy which is one key ingredient to Jane Eyre’s and Persuasion’s success.
Comedy is by some definitions, indeed, a story with a ‘happy’ ending, and one in which the girl and the boy get together. Barbara Pym is certainly a comic writer. This book is one of her richest and most amusing. But she very deftly turns comic tradition on its head.
Excellent Women, published in 1952, is a quiet story, but one which places itself, by constant literary reference, very much within the conventions of English romantic and comic fiction. The comic characters in Barbara Pym’s world—the clumsy curate Father Greatorex, the stout jolly parish worker Sister Blatt, the too-elegant clergy widow Mrs Gray (a latter-day Chaucer’s Prioress), and the gang of middle-aged women who attend the local vicar Father Malory’s church in Pimlico are superbly delineated figures, all subtly hilarious, but, unlike so many figures in consciously comic fiction, entirely credible as living human beings.
Read at this distance, we also feel that this is a comedy with an edge. It is a book written in the decade which saw Iris Murdoch’s rise to fame, as a chronicler of promiscuous and tormented love, between the married, the unmarried, the straight and the gay; the decade which saw Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and John Braine’s Joe Lampton (Room at the Top) make their predatory and beery advances on young women. Mildred Lathbury, the heroine of Excellent Women, belongs to a more conservative vision, the vanishing breed of frosty gentlewomen, yet her story does not end conventionally.
In the last few pages of the book she is asked to dinner by a stuffy young anthropologist named Everard Bone. It is seven years after the ending of the Second World War, during which so many bedsits and hotel rooms in London witnessed incongruous amours. But this couple do not spend the last pages of the book in one another’s arms. Everard does not ask Mildred to remove her clothes; rather, he asks her to help him read the proofs of the anthropological book on which he is working. Hitherto, Mildred’s emotional excitements have been limited to watching Father Malory form an unsuitable attachment to the beautiful Mrs Gray and then break off his engagement; and to observing the near break-up of the glamorous couple Rockingham and Helena Napier in the flat beneath hers in Pimlico, followed by their reconciliation. She concludes her narrative by thinking that what with her duties, ‘protecting’ Father Malory from the emotional advances of any other women, ‘and the work I was going to do for Everard, it seemed as if I might be going to have what Helena called “a full life” after all’.
There is comedy in this, for sure, but wintry comedy.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.
These lines from the poem ‘Dockery and Son’ were written eleven years after Excellent Women by one of the novel’s most ardent fans, Philip Larkin. It is not surprising that the two writers became friends—first very distant penpals, then occasionally meeting for lunches or teas. They had a shared vision. Although she was a church-goer, and indeed a pious one, and he an atheist, they were both rather doggedly unmarried, both with their eyes fixed firmly on the inevitability of ‘age, and then the only end of age’. Pym’s first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, is a fantasy based on herself and her sister. The idea for it came in her twenties, but it projects herself forward into old age when her life
is bounded by reading, church, domestic routine, and food. There is a nihilistic sense in both Pym and Larkin that life cannot hold out very exciting possibilities. Most human beings have limited freedom about their choice of careers. They consider themselves lucky to find paid employment and then become ‘stuck’ in boring jobs. They have to choose between the loneliness of being on their own or the ultimate unsatisfactoriness of subsuming the ego to life with another.
These choices all seem painfully clear, both in Larkin’s poetry and in Pym. Children, if they cross the pages at all—which in Excellent Women they do not—are confined to the margins of life. (The first outing I ever had with Larkin, he pointed to a notice on a pub door and said they were the three words he found most cheering: NO CHILDREN ALLOWED). Yet with no children, however tiresome they may be, there is no future.
Bad artists, when projecting themselves into fantastical roles, have an inclination to exaggerate their erotic allure. The classic case would be Ian Fleming, who invented the fearless and sexually voracious James Bond. Pym and Larkin, from their published work, both seem so muted in their emotional response to life that one might be tempted to assume them to have been celibates, or near celibates. As subsequent biographers revealed to their quizzical admirers, this was not the case. Larkin might have lived alone, until middle age, in a series of rented rooms in provincial English towns, but he had a mouvementé emotional existence, for a long time keeping two or even three women on the go. Pym herself had lovers.
One such, a long-term student boyfriend called Henry Harvey, gets transmogrified into the Archdeacon in Some Tame Gazelle, where Pym herself becomes a twittering female admirer, Miss Bede. In real life, writing to Harvey about Excellent Women, Pym said, ‘I suppose every man I have ever known will see himself as Rocky (the rather shallow character).’ Rockingham Napier, in this novel, is a dashing young naval officer, who is clearly based on a figure with whom Pym had an affair in Naples during the war. But in the book, he merely has cups of tea and flirts with Mildred Lathbury, Pym’s churchy, starched self-projection.
I make these points to suggest that Pym’s novels are works of art which are contrived with very exact purposes. Their comedy depends on a recognition of life’s limitations. Pym wrote them in the 1950s, a decade of exceptional austerity, when Britain was slowly beginning to recover from the economic, emotional and physical devastation of a world war and the loss of a global empire.
In this book the food alone is worthy of study. The first meal which we hear about is supper at the vicarage with Father Malory and his sister, to which Mildred Lathbury is invited. It is prepared by a servant, Mrs Jubb.
Tonight she set before us a pale macaroni cheese and a dish of boiled potatoes, and I noticed a blancmange or ‘shape’, also of an indeterminate colour, in a glass dish on the sideboard.
Not enough salt, or perhaps no salt, I thought, as I ate the macaroni. And not really enough cheese.
It could be a description not merely of one meal in the life of Mildred Lathbury, but also of the muted flavour which Pym deliberately creates around her characters. This is a world where if you go out for a cooked tea you know that the eggs ‘“wouldn’t be real”’. (This is a joke which most younger readers would need explained. In 1952 powdered egg was still commonplace and many foodstuffs were still rationed as during the war). Food on that particular menu includes paste sandwiches and curried whale, which prompts a discussion, naturally, between the incurably churchy heroine and her friend, about the insuitability of whale as a food for church fast days, when one should only consume fish. (‘“The whale is a mammal.”’) We are in a world where spaghetti (other than tinned inch-long snippets of the stuff in red sauce) is thought so sophisticated that it completely silences the heroine when she is taken out for a restaurant meal. (‘Perhaps long spaghetti is the kind of thing that ought to be eaten quite alone with nobody to watch one’s struggles. Surely many a romance must have been nipped in the bud by sitting opposite somebody eating spaghetti?’) An ‘extravagant’ and solitary lunch back in Mildred’s flat consists of ‘two scrambled eggs, preceded by the remains of some soup and followed by cheese, biscuits and an apple’. Over this meal, ‘it would [have been] a good opportunity to read some of the things I was always meaning to read, like In Memoriam or The Brothers Karamazov, but in the end I was reduced to reading the serial in the parish magazine’.
Wine is regarded as an extraordinary luxury, and it is warmed up in front of gas fires. Nature itself seems to be bounded by the austere domestic routines of these people’s horizons. ‘It was one of those sad late September evenings when by switching on a bar of the electric fire one realises at last that summer is over’. That is such a Larkinian sentence. This is comedy defined by lack of future.
In this sober world, who are the Excellent Women of the excellent title? A defining answer to the question comes when Mildred and Everard Bone are having supper together about two-thirds of the way through the story. Rocky’s wife, Helena, also an anthropologist, has formed an attachment to Everard, who does not return her affections; and Helena, having left her husband, has now gone back to her mother; meanwhile, Mildred and Everard, fellow Anglo-Catholics, are staring bleakly at a ‘piece of fish’ on their plates. Would Everard like to have married Helena, Mildred asks. ‘“Certainly not,” he declared. “She is not at all the kind of person I should choose for my wife.”’ When questioned more closely, he says that he would want to marry a ‘sensible’ person, one who would help him with his work. He mentions an office drudge called Esther Clovis. ‘“An excellent woman altogether.”’
‘“You could consider marrying an excellent woman?” I asked in amazement. “But they are not for marrying”’ There follows some mild humour—‘“You’re surely not suggesting that they are for the other things?”’ Does this mean, Everard asks, when the joke dies, that excellent women are not allowed to have ‘“the normal feelings”’. ‘“Oh yes,”’ is the reply, ‘“but nothing can be done about them.”’
Excellent women are women that men take for granted. In a parish, they are there to help make the tea, arrange flowers in the church and provide companionship for the more boring members of the congregation with whom the priests can’t be bothered. In offices, they again make tea, and coffee, and do the tedious chores of indexing, proof-reading and filing. They conceal their sexual needs, and consider it somehow unpleasant to let them show. Those women who are openly sexually alluring do not seem to be excellent, and do not need to bother themselves with such unselfish tasks as washing up or making curtains. (Helena, Rocky’s wife, and the lofty ice-queen Allegra Gray, so quizzically observed by Mildred, are not excellent women. Do they have a happier life? Probably, but one of the points of the book is that such happiness is beyond the emotional capacities of most human beings of either sex).
Many twenty-first-century readers might read this novel with disbelief and keep looking back to its date of publication. It was written after a world war in which women had played a key role in victory. Pym herself was a university graduate. And yet these women, who believe they have passed an intimate emotional barrier if they so much as use someone else’s first name rather than being ‘Miss So-and-so’, who dress dowdily and exist only to be subservient to others, apparently accept, if a little uneasily, this idea of their role. The struggles of the Sisterhood, from the early days of nineteenth-century feminism, through the writings of that other Barbara Bodichon, or George Eliot, or John Stuart Mill, or through the martyrdoms of the suffragists of the early twentieth century, and the campaigners for fairer deals for women, seem to have passed Mildred by. Similarly, one might ask whether the church which she supports so enthusiastically is recognisable as the organisation which forty years later would one day ordain women to the priesthood?
There can be no doubt that Excellent Women depicts what is for us a vanished world, and one which was vanishing fast as Pym depicted it. She is like a watercolourist trying to catch the flare of a sunset before it goes. And so
me reasons for the quite extraordinary deadness and flatness of Mildred’s life are surely to be found in the sociological and political changes brought about by the end of the Empire, and the war. Before the Second World War, it was not only the upper classes and the rich in England who enjoyed a privileged position which today is all but unimaginable. The middle classes might have been poor—Mildred works for a charity for Distressed Gentlefolk—but the class structure was firmly in place. However, during the war class barriers began to break down. Men doing military service, and women doing war work, came into contact with people of many different classes. The ‘deference’ for which snobs might be nostalgic was soon discovered by the officer classes to be highly ironic; and the result of the 1945 General Election, a landslide for Labour in spite of Churchill being the supposed Liberator of Europe, made it clear that the British working people were determined never to return to the old days when country solicitors such as Barbara Pym’s father might have one or two servants, while the working classes lived in insanitary conditions with no decent provision for sickness or old age.
People of Barbara Pym’s class felt especially threatened at this period. Such ‘genteel’ types, for the rest of the century, continued to keep up old customs and manners, and these are faithfully and comically recorded in Pym’s fiction. (Another of the young men in this book boasts of having a ‘club’, even though Mildred suspects him of bluffing.) But this class’s position in the world was radically altered. The church which played so big a part in their life was, for many British people, reduntant. It is this background which explains the very real anger which exists in Pym’s work (as in Larkin’s) and which erupts in the latter stages of her diaries (A Very Private Eye) and in what is perhaps her bitterest novel, Quartet in Autumn, of 1977.
In Excellent Women, the dismay at what has happened to the genteel middle classes and their shattered world is contained within a brittle irony. It is a novel which we read today not only amazed at the freshness with which it has photographed that world of post-war London, when living was so much more austere and manners so much stiffer. It is also of a perennial theme. Most of us do not have a burning sense of vocation. Few are blessed with the self-confidence or self-conceit to believe that our existence, still less our jobs, make much difference to the planet. Without even the consolation of thinking that we have given a child to the next generation, what is there which could be said to give our life, or life in general, any ‘point’? It is this bleak Chekhovian question which lies at the heart of Pym’s comedy. After fifty years of social change, there are still ‘Barbara Pym’ characters to be met in real life, people trying to maintain a bit of dignity in the midst of humdrum lives, and deriving harmless amusement from the foibles of others, and from trivia—imagining the lives, for example, of those who place small ads in the Church Times.