They were hungry, they were starving, they ate everything they could find, but when she told this story to a historian many decades later, what she marveled at were the plates they left unwashed. Perhaps she enjoyed that memory of how a feminine reflex simply stopped operating, and nobody missed it. Or perhaps it was easier for her to talk about dirty dishes than about snatching up a feast in the wake of so much death. But the truth is, you never just eat. No matter how hungry you are, it’s never just food. Evdokia Domina’s food story, which culminated at the very time the inhabitants of Hitler’s bunker were frantically making their way through bottle after bottle of champagne, was about the harsh cost of surviving. Eva’s food story was about how often, and how easily, she died.
Barbara Pym
(1913–1980)
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.
—Excellent Women
Like generations of food lovers before her, Julia Child came away from her first trip to Britain convinced that there really was no hope for such a nation. It was the spring of 1949, and she and her husband, Paul, had come over from Paris to tour the north of England. “[We] stopped at a beautiful Tudor Inn, which was truly oldey woldey and charming,” she recalled several years later in a jovial letter to her friend Avis DeVoto. “Dinner, and we had boiled chicken with the hair still on partially covered with a real honest to goodness English white sauce. I had always heard of it, but thought it was just a lot of French chauvinism. But this was really it, flour and water with hardly any salt, not even made with the chicken bouillon.” The fact that rationing was still on, that hotels and restaurants had taken a dive during the war, that many hadn’t recovered—none of this entered into her appraisal. By the time she was looking back on that meal it was 1953, and she had returned to England many times, always staying with friends who served delicious meals. No matter. These particular friends loved France and French food, she pointed out. So as far as Julia was concerned, they didn’t really count as British, at least when they cooked.
Julia’s attitude toward British food—that it was inedible, that it had little relevant history apart from being inedible, and that a more sensible population would simply take its meals in France—had been locked into place for a long time, and no respectable gourmand would have contradicted her. Even Rosa Lewis, unusual in her day for freely criticizing French cooks as well as British, made sure that her menus were written in French no matter what was on the plate. After all, her clients were perfectly aware of the difference between “Soup” and “Soupe,” even when the former was “Clear Turtle” and the latter was “Tortue Claire.” By 1928, when classic French cuisine had been priced out of most British homes and restaurants, critics such as the food and wine writer Morton Shand were castigating “faded lettuce . . . bottled sauces . . . and flaccid, malodourous cabbage,” and four years later a story in the Manchester Guardian about a movement to promote the best in British cooking was headed, defiantly, “Our Cooking Not Stodgy.” Elizabeth David, who spent the late 1940s working on what would become a landmark of culinary literature, A Book of Mediterranean Food, once remarked that it was almost the first British cookbook to appear after the war. “It was a time really when they didn’t have cookery articles,” she pointed out. “Why should they? They didn’t have food.”
But they did have food, often excellent food, and one of the reasons we know about it is Barbara Pym, whose fiction sprang directly from the life around her. Barbara was an observer by nature; her eyes and ears were on permanent alert. What inspired her was the world she knew, and that world was England. Her novels have suffered from an odd reputation over the years: widely praised, they’re nevertheless often summed up as depicting drab spinsters pouring tea for the clergy while life dwindles quietly away. Nothing could be less accurate. Yes, there’s tea, there’s clergy, and there are spinsters, but the women are radiant with personality, the clergy are subjected to gentle, persistent ridicule, and the tea plays so many symbolic roles that another writer would have had to create a whole slew of walk-on characters to say what Barbara says with a cup. She loved Englishness. She loved Englishness in all its manifestations, and she took particular pleasure in what the English ate.
Barbara Pym at her typewriter, 1979.
Barbara was not a food writer, but she saw the world as if she were—as if every piece of cake or even just the crumbs on the plate offered the most enticing clues imaginable to time, place, class, and character. The novels she published from the 1950s through the 1970s are full of food; and in the little notebooks that she carried everywhere she used to jot down her daily sightings of food, sometimes the moment they occurred. “Soup, jelly and bread and butter—That’s not much of a meal for a man—I think as I sit [in] the Kardomah.” To read her novels, especially in concert with her diaries, is to discover a revisionist history of midcentury British cooking. She didn’t set out to overturn any long-cherished assumptions about the horrors of British food, but character after character, meal after meal, that’s exactly what happens.
In 1949, for instance, the very year that Julia Child encountered a ghoulish boiled chicken with the hair still on, Barbara had just completed the final draft of her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, and sent it off to a publisher. Boiled chicken with white sauce shows up early and often in that book. In fact, it’s the centerpiece of the novel’s first extended scene, in which two middle-aged sisters, Belinda and Harriet, are entertaining a curate newly arrived at their village church. Here’s the dish as Barbara Pym saw and tasted it:
In the dining-room Harriet sat at one end of the table and Belinda at the other, with the curate in the middle. Harriet carved the boiled chicken smothered in white sauce very capably. She gave the curate all the best white meat.
Were all new curates everywhere always given boiled chicken when they came to supper for the first time? Belinda wondered. It was certainly an established ritual at their house and it seemed somehow right for a new curate. The coldness, the whiteness, the muffling with sauce, perhaps even the sharpness added by the slices of lemon, there was something appropriate here, even if Belinda could not see exactly what it was.
Same year, same dish, but an entirely different—and tempting—version of a prototypical British company meal. It’s true that Barbara wrote the first draft of Some Tame Gazelle in the mid-1930s, and the book reflects that period, not the postwar era. But according to Morton Shand, the food was already disastrous in 1928; and according to Julia, it was just as disastrous in the early 1950s. In other words, the reputation of British food stands on its own, independent of real time. It has to be bad, because bad is its identity.
And yet, it’s not bad in Some Tame Gazelle, where Belinda and Harriet live well and pay a great deal of attention to what they eat. Harriet likes her roast beef rare; Belinda makes ravioli by hand; the scones at tea are fresh and hot. The boiled chicken on their table would not have borne any resemblance to the miserable dish Julia described. More likely they offered the curate something along the lines of “Boiled Chicken with Special Sauce,” from a 1935 cookbook by Helen Simpson. It’s not inconceivable that Barbara would have known this cookbook. Simpson was a prolific, reasonably successful novelist living in London in the 1930s; she also wrote occasionally about food, and her cookbook, The Cold Table, was published by Jonathan Cape, the house that would publish most of Barbara’s work, including Some Tame Gazelle. Simpson’s chicken isn’t boiled at all, despite its name; it’s carefully simmered with onion, parsley, and carrots. The “special sauce” is a white sauce made with flour, butter, cream, mace, and lemon peel, then stiffened with gelatin and spread on the chicken. Cold, white, tasting of lemon just a bit—Belinda’s description evokes this very dish.
There is
terrible food, too, in Some Tame Gazelle. Invited to dine in a household where nobody much cares about cooking, Belinda politely tries to ignore the cigarette ash that falls into a pot of baked beans. Dinner at the archdeacon’s home isn’t much better: his wife serves dry rissoles, “stringy cabbage,” tinned soup, and instant coffee. What’s revelatory, from the standpoint of culinary history, is that the terrible food in this book is noteworthy rather than inevitable. Barbara took it for granted that a comfortable English life would have fine, fragrant cooking in it. Here, in her very first novel, she was already deep into a radical retelling of the state of the British table.
As soon as her books began appearing in 1950, Barbara won a small circle of devoted readers who pounced on each new publication with joy. But in the critical establishment that mattered in postwar Britain, her work received little attention—so little that after six books the publishing industry lost interest in her modest sales and dropped her. From 1963 to 1977 she received nothing but rejection letters. Then an unexpected critical coronation prompted a splendid rush of fame, and she spent the last few years of her life grateful and jubilant.
But it’s easy to see why she occupied such a relatively obscure niche for so long. Barbara specialized in a minor-key world located well back from fiction’s cutting edge, with a gentle stream of irony running quietly below the surface. Her mild-mannered narrators are often found musing on their favorite lines from Anglican hymns or making Ovaltine at moments of late night crisis. When Barbara sets a scene in a bedroom, there’s generally a book of Victorian poetry nearby and a nice cup of tea. (“Life’s problems are often eased by hot milky drinks.”) Yet these are women who can skewer a narcissistic male with wit so deft he barely notices, and their hilarious, finely tuned perceptions light up every page. Her admirers regularly evoke Jane Austen, and she shares territory with Anthony Trollope as well; but she was up against a postwar literary canon that didn’t have a lot of patience with Ovaltine. Critics seemed embarrassed to praise her work even when they loved it. Reviewing Barbara’s second novel, John Betjeman said many people would surely find it “tame,” what with all the church bazaars and the boiled eggs. He added, almost apologetically, “To me it is a perfect book.”
Barbara’s sudden fame after 1977—the new publishing contracts, the interviews, the fresh attention to her work—is always termed the “rediscovery” of Barbara Pym. But I’m not sure that’s the right word. Maybe “redefinition” would be more accurate. What really happened is that the postwar literary canon was forced to wriggle around a bit in order to make room for a writer who plainly had no assigned seat. Barbara’s readers, the longtime fans and the new ones, never had any trouble appreciating the savvy sensibility of her churchgoing heroines, even if they were distinctly unglamorous and rarely turned their attention to sex. But some critics simply didn’t know what to make of all these women in their shabby cardigans, helping out at jumble sales and poring over Crockford’s Clerical Directory. Did characters like these belong in the ranks of great contemporary fiction? Margaret Drabble, Edna O’Brien—that’s what groundbreaking women’s writing was supposed to look like. Barbara’s work was nothing like theirs, and yet it was undeniably powerful. Many reviewers came to the only viable conclusion: surely the books were as heartbreaking as they were comic, the women best understood as brave but barren females in an England stripped of empire. How else to account for the genuine dignity of Barbara’s world, not to mention the excellence of the prose? Such terms as “tragic” and “tragi-comic” began turning up in discussions of Barbara’s work. Critics detected “neglect, desolation and loneliness” in the stream of consciousness moving through each book, as if the tone of wry, gentle amusement so fundamental in Barbara’s voice were simply not there. John Updike, writing about Barbara after her books began appearing in the United States in 1979, admired them greatly—for their “wanly Christian world,” for the sense of “atomic aloneness in a crowded world,” for the “extremely meagre social fabric Miss Pym weaves for her characters.”
Barbara was mystified when people talked about the unhappy lives of the women she invented. One reason she loved them was for the pleasure they took in all aspects of the ordinary. She herself went through life that way, with an unlimited capacity to be fascinated by whatever passed in front of her. She also had a healthy respect for the marriage plot and took care to create male soul mates for most of her heroines, though critics committed to the doomed-spinster interpretation rarely took note of the suitors who were waiting in the wings. But perhaps the most overlooked theme of her novels—the motif that tells us again and again at top volume that these are women with a passion for life—is the delight they take in food. Intensely curious herself about what people were eating, whether they were characters in books or real people sitting across the table from her, Barbara was always disappointed when novels and memoirs left out the culinary details. Hence she made a point of embedding them in her own fiction. Bad food, good food, other people’s food, the food on their own tables: Barbara’s narrators are captivated by all of it. How could so many discerning critics miss this glorious proclamation of faith? Perhaps it was because Barbara was neither a gastronome nor a sensualist, which meant that whatever she said about eating tended to slip quietly off the page.
• • •
11 March 1938: “I went to lunch with Julian in Balliol. We had fish, duck and green peas, fresh peaches and cream. Sherry, Niersteiner, and port.”
Barbara was a culinary historian’s dream. She started keeping diaries soon after she arrived at Oxford as a student in 1931 and continued writing in them for the rest of her life, mentioning food all the while. At first she simply tossed in an occasional reference to what she ate—“the loveliest cocktail I’ve had—a sidecar very iced”; an eighteen-pound turkey at a family Christmas dinner; “huge toast sandwiches” at Selfridges; lunch with a new beau (“We had eggs with cream on the top, chicken, and chocolate mousse”). Later she realized that the life around her was always going to be her favorite source of inspiration, so she made a point of paying more consistent attention to food, and sometimes she used the same diaries to jot down a shopping list or a recipe. All her personal and professional papers went to the Bodleian Library at Oxford; hence it’s now possible to track the eating habits of middle-class, midcentury England filtered through the life and times of a lively, very funny writer who happened to be addicted to the practice of spying and eavesdropping on everyone within reach. It’s a splendid archive and thoroughly rewarding for a culinary-minded researcher who’s more accustomed to turning page after fragile page of somebody’s diary and finding only “After dinner, we decided to . . .” or “He stopped by for lunch, and then . . .” or, most irritating of all, “Breakfast didn’t take long.” The more unremarkable the food, the more likely it was to have gone unremarked. Not so with Barbara.
At Oxford, however, she had a number of competing preoccupations, chief among them men. She was eighteen when she arrived in 1931, tall and high-spirited, with an eager smile, and she spent her academic years as well as the decade following in a flurry of love affairs—some brief, some extended, all absorbing, many unrequited, and a few imaginary. As an undergraduate she also fell deeply in love with English literature, and this was a relationship that lasted the rest of her life. “Our greater English poets,” as Belinda refers to them in Some Tame Gazelle, would always occupy the very center of Barbara’s heart. After Oxford she went home to Shropshire with a degree in English, a vague ambition to write, and a feverish devotion to a literary scholar named Henry Harvey, who had shaken her off and moved to Finland to teach. There seemed no way to free herself from this amour fou; even pursuing other men didn’t help. That summer her father brought home a secondhand typewriter, and, using the two-finger system she would retain for decades, she started to dream up Some Tame Gazelle. The title came from Thomas Haynes Bayly, one of our distinctly lesser poets of the early nineteenth century:
So
me tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!
The first draft of the novel, which remains with her papers at the Bodleian, is an awkward mess of bad writing and chaotic plotting—not surprising, perhaps, since the project was essentially therapeutic, meant to help her gain some distance from Henry and her hopeless passion. She set the novel in a classic English village and made all the characters heavily caricatured versions of her Oxford friends. Henry became a pompous, self-absorbed archdeacon, and she herself played the role of Belinda, a dreamy-eyed spinster who has been pining for the archdeacon ever since their long-ago Oxford days. Her friends, who of course recognized themselves, greatly enjoyed reading the manuscript; for the rest of us it comes across as an endless, tedious in-joke. When she had no success finding a publisher, she put the manuscript away; but she continued to work on stories and novels until 1941, when single women her age had to register for war work.
During the war, which she spent in the Censorship Office and later in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, Barbara had one more spectacularly doomed love affair, this time with a journalist who was in the process of getting divorced from one of her best friends. As far as he was concerned, the affair was a fling, but Barbara took it more seriously. She seems to have believed, or persuaded herself, that he would propose once his divorce was final; but by the time he was free, it was obvious that he had lost interest. Yet even during the time she was most obsessed with him, Barbara wrote very little in her diary about marriage per se. She was far more likely to record “snatched kisses,” or poignant farewells over a glass of sherry, than she was to set down any blissful reveries about weddings. Much as she relished her social life with men, she never made a sustained effort to find a lifelong partner among them. One or two swains proposed; she refused them. It was as if she knew, back when she was creating Belinda in her own image, that this poetry-loving Englishwoman was far happier remaining single than she would have been if she had married the man of her dreams.
What She Ate Page 17