After the war she set up a home in London with her sister, Hilary, and took a job as an editor at the International African Institute, which published scholarly monographs and a journal of anthropology. The institute would inspire some of the most hilarious moments in her novels, but she was working there chiefly to pay the bills; and once she was settled in the flat, she turned her attention to what mattered most. She wanted to write, and she wanted to call herself a writer, and she wanted to feel as though “writer” were her proper and permanent identity. There was nothing for her in the term “wife.” She still had one more painful love ahead of her—a man so much younger than she was, and so plainly homosexual, that she probably knew even at the time that his role in her life was to reappear in some future novel. (Sure enough, he became James in The Sweet Dove Died.) Meanwhile, as she told a friend, “There is so much that I want to write now, that I hardly know where to begin.” So she began at the beginning. She pulled out the unsuccessful draft of Some Tame Gazelle and determined to get it right.
One of her early readers had been Robert Liddell, an Oxford friend who was teaching English at the University of Cairo and had already published his own first novel. Liddell was enthusiastic about the draft, but he could see numerous problems and sent her pages of questions and suggestions. With his help, Barbara did an extraordinary job of self-editing: she sharpened the characters, simplified the plot, slashed away every scrap of extraneous prose, and allowed her natural sense of irony to reach its level. Most important, she swept out the in-joke sensibility and placed the novel in a real-world setting that was wide-open to readers who had never heard of Henry Harvey or, for that matter, Barbara. The real world was going to be the key to her literary kingdom—she could see that now, and all her instincts confirmed it. “More household detail,” she instructed herself as she did the rewrite. “Knitting patterns . . . doing the altar flowers . . . Jam.” She underlined the word “Jam” and added, “Victoria plum 1907 with mould on the top.” She had found her center of balance.
Some Tame Gazelle was published in 1950 and won a number of warm reviews—Barbara was placed in the very good company of Mrs. Gaskell and Angela Thirkell, as well as Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope—and while she was reading them she was already deep into her next book. This time her imagination was focused, right from the start, on what she could see. Years earlier she had noted in her diary that she didn’t really like having lunch at the Lyons Corner Houses, since they were so big, “but the food isn’t bad and one can observe life from there.” Now she felt justified in treating her intense, habitual gaze on the world as professional practice. Writers carried notebooks and used them religiously; she would, too. One day in 1948 she sat down in a department store cafeteria, looked about her, and took out a small, spiral-bound notebook. “Two women at my table in D. H. Evans Help Yourself,” she wrote. “Talking about somebody who has died. Hushed voices.” That little notebook would be the first of eighty-two that she accumulated over the next three decades, each a torrent of scribbles. “What riches!” she used to crow after a particularly fruitful viewing session in a park or restaurant.
This middle-aged lady is sitting in Lyons reading the Church Times and eating Scrambled Egg Beano. Her fluty voice.
The back view of a man ordering drinks, while you stand or sit nonchalantly.
In the hotel—two women are talking at lunch of how to relieve the vicar’s burdens.
Later (in Lyons) . . . He used to get whale meat and boil it all up. Of course there were dog hairs everywhere. I’m sure that if anything happened to Madge he’d get another dog.
It’s not always clear in these notes whether she was recording her actual observations of the moment or whether she was trying out phrases and ideas for possible later use. Scenarios, characters, incidents, experiments with wording—she filled page after page but often didn’t bother to say how an item originated. (She was puzzled by this herself at times. Going over one of her notebooks later, she scribbled next to a scrap of conversation, “What is this and where did I get it?”) Reading through the notebooks today, we feel as though we’re tracking Barbara from novel to novel, following the footprints she left behind as she wandered across the landscape she would turn into fiction. She copied down signs posted in the vestry of a church, newspaper headlines, plaques on historic buildings, bits from letters she received at work (“Dear Colleague—are you interested in the origin of the word ‘zebra’?”). One day she noticed a headline in the Daily Mirror: SECRET LOVE OF VANISHED VICAR. She could almost sing the words—the meter was exactly that of a hymn tune. She made a note of it. Another day she was in the Kardomah, a lunch spot she favored in part for its excellent viewing opportunities, when she overheard a bit of gossip about a man who had gone on a trip to Madeira—“and he didn’t like it at all, but then he isn’t very enthusiastic about anything except bird-watching.” She wrote it down. It was all fuel, it all made the engines run. Once she tried describing her method to an audience in Barnes, the suburb where she and Hilary lived in the 1950s. “Often it is just a single reference or idea that fires the imagination,” she told the group. “I have a collection of newspaper cuttings on a variety of subjects—A stuffed crocodile found on a beach . . . a woman who annoyed her neighbours by playing the harp and banging on a tin tray . . . a woman who fell in love with a clergyman she saw on television and proposed marriage to—those are just a few that have taken my fancy, but what use they will ever be I can’t possibly imagine.” Yet everything was useful; everything had a niche in that abundantly stocked museum she carried about in her notebooks like a personal Victoria and Albert.
Her favorite place to watch human behavior was a restaurant, for there she could sit quietly in the background while people interacted with food. Each glimpse of the intimate relationship between the person and the plate cried out to her. Cafeterias, tea shops, cafés, pubs, dining cars, a park at noon—anywhere people were eating was fertile ground. To be in the presence of food—appetizing, appalling, it hardly mattered—was to start creating. “Hazel and I lunched at the Golden Egg,” she wrote in 1964. “Oh, the horror. . . . The cold stuffiness, claustrophic placing of tables, garish lighting and mass produced food in steel dishes. And the dreary young people—the egg-shaped menu. But perhaps one could get something out of it. The setting for a breaking off, or some terrible news, or an unwanted declaration of love. . . .” It’s no wonder that Excellent Women, her best-loved novel and the one fans and critics inevitably conjure when they’re trying to describe the world of Barbara Pym, took shape in her mind around images of food. She was at work on the book, which would become her second published novel, on that same day in 1948 when she was sitting in the D. H. Evans Help Yourself with her first notebook.
“Food—a fresh salad dressed with oil and salt, gruyere cheese and greengages—crusty bread,” she wrote. Then she changed “salad” to “lettuce.” Thanks to this visible editing, we can guess that she was thinking in terms of the new novel. The rewrite was an improvement: “salad” was too fussy for this particular image. With “lettuce” she arrived at a classic little meal, put together from a few simple but perfect ingredients and ideally served outdoors, perhaps on a sunny French hillside. When Excellent Women was published in 1952, this lunch appeared in almost the exact form Barbara had originally imagined; the only thing she altered was the cheese, from “gruyere” to “Camembert.” The lettuce, the cheese, the crusty loaf—she had spied a character emerging from these materials, and she wanted to keep them intact.
Barbara wrote Excellent Women in the first person and placed the rest of the novel close to home. She and Hilary were living in Pimlico, in a flat overlooking St. Gabriel’s church in Warwick Square, and she put her narrator in a similar flat right in the same neighborhood. A modest spinster in a drab skirt and cardigan, Mildred helps out with the church jumble sale and works part-time for an organization that assists “impoverished gentlewomen.” There is nothing chic or wor
ldly about her: she is the daughter of a vicar and carries a biography of Cardinal Newman in a string bag to read on the bus to work. But one day she has occasion to make an impromptu lunch for the man who lives in the flat downstairs, who’s become an entrancing new friend. His wife has just left him, and although Mildred can see that Rocky is too handsome and sophisticated for a mousy spinster like herself, they get along extremely well and she has surprised herself by developing an exciting little crush on him.
I washed a lettuce and dressed it with a little of my hoarded olive oil and some salt. I also had a Camembert cheese, a fresh loaf and a bowl of greengages for dessert. It seemed an idyllic sort of meal that ought to have been eaten in the open air, with a bottle of wine and what is known as “good” conversation. I thought it unlikely that I should be able to provide either the conversation or the wine, but I remembered that I had a bottle of brandy which I kept, according to old-fashioned custom, for “emergencies” and I decided to bring it in with the coffee.
Apart from the missing wine, nothing could be in better taste than this iconic repast, expertly prepared from the ingredients at hand. And nothing could be less British, at least according to popular perceptions then and now of the nation’s postwar eating habits. “How one learns to dread the season for salads in England,” Elizabeth David wrote in Summer Cooking, which appeared three years after Excellent Women. “What becomes of the hearts of the lettuces? . . . What is the object of spending so much money on cucumbers, tomatoes, and lettuces because of their valuable vitamins, and then drowning them in vinegar and chemical salad dressings?” She went on to give three “absolutely essential rules” for salad making: very fresh lettuce, the barest possible trace of vinegar, and the dressing added at the last minute. Each rule, of course, had been anticipated by Mildred. David had been an authoritative voice on aspirational culinary standards for middle-class British food lovers ever since publishing A Book of Mediterranean Food in 1950. Her sun-drenched recipes, laced with wine and garlic, were far indeed from the boiled mutton and mashed turnips long associated with English dinnertime, not to mention the corned-beef curries and “Spaghetti Americaine” that had been making their way across the land since the 1930s. Yet Barbara had scribbled “Food—a fresh salad” in her notebook a full two years before the now legendary birth of Mediterranean Food. As a writer who breathed the air of real life and couldn’t survive in any other medium, Barbara used the food she knew to tell the stories she knew. If she decided that Mildred, dowdy and unprepossessing and very, very British, was thinking this way about salads in the late 1940s, then there’s reason to believe that it was not a startling way to think about salads.
To be sure, Barbara was hardly implying that droopy salads had disappeared from the British table. They didn’t even disappear from Excellent Women. Later in the novel, Rocky moves away and a dejected Mildred watches his furniture depart in a van. “I went upstairs to my flat to eat a melancholy lunch. A dried-up scrap of cheese, a few lettuce leaves for which I could not be bothered to make any dressing, a tomato and a piece of bread-and-butter. . . .” Hopeless love, always a cherished emotional state with Barbara, had flourished in the company of a man and a fine salad; but Rocky’s absence is simply depressing, and Mildred’s lunch follows suit.
Mildred’s olive oil is “hoarded” because Barbara started writing Excellent Women in 1948, when postwar rationing was still in effect. Elsewhere in the novel, fresh eggs are scarce, “curried whale” appears on a Lyons menu, and the food Mildred is able to obtain for her plain meals at home is often, she admits, uninteresting—a chop, a bit of fish, a few tins. But on the whole there’s little emphasis on privation in Mildred’s life: she eats well in Soho restaurants, and at the end of the novel, during a cozy evening at the fireside of the man she will probably marry, they share “a very nice bird” and a bottle of red wine. Only when Barbara wants to make a point about spinsterhood does Mildred deliberately prepare a meager meal for herself, as she did at lunchtime after Rocky’s departure. Yet these solitary meals have different nuances, depending on what Barbara intends them to convey. When the vicar becomes engaged to a new parishioner, for instance, everyone assumes that the news will be a devastating blow to Mildred. She is single, he is eligible, the two are friends—surely she must have been hoping to marry him. In truth she has no romantic interest in him at all, but the next time she shows up at church, she can’t seem to make anyone believe that she isn’t heartbroken. “After the service I went home and cooked my fish. Cod seemed a suitable dish for a rejected one and I ate it humbly without any kind of sauce or relish.” Here Mildred’s perception of herself is tinged so delicately with irony that Barbara doesn’t even put words to it, letting her heroine reflect on the plainness of the fish with a smile that’s kept out of sight. Like the sorry remnants of salad that bring an end to Mildred’s fantasy about Rocky, this unadorned fish is also “a woman’s meal,” but it’s one that doesn’t depress Mildred in the slightest. It’s impossible to miss the amusement in her voice.
“Why is it that men find my books so sad?” Barbara wondered once. “Women don’t particularly.” But she was wrong: critics of both sexes have regarded her heroines as exemplars of loneliness and sterility, and Mildred has been a particular target of pity. In his introduction to the 2006 Penguin edition of Excellent Women, A. N. Wilson underscores what he sees as the “quite extraordinary deadness and flatness of Mildred’s life,” and he calls attention to the food to press his point. Wine, he suggests by way of an example, “is regarded as an extraordinary luxury, and it is warmed up in front of gas fires.” But even though Mildred doesn’t drink wine every day, several other characters do. In fact, wine flows as readily through Barbara’s work as it did through her life. And yes, in Excellent Women it’s warmed up in front of gas fires—Barbara made sure of that. She thought men who made a fetish of the proprieties of serving wine were silly, and among her earliest notes for the novel we find “Man fussing about wine—chilled etc.” This image helped to supply her with the character named William, a stuffy friend of Mildred’s who prides himself on his expertise in wine and once orders a bottle of Nuits-Saint-Georges while pompously warning her that not every bottle under that label was as good as it should be. (“‘It might,’ he said seriously, ‘be an ordinaire. Always remember that.’”)
It’s true that Mildred herself never claims to be anything but “mousy and rather plain”—the day she nervously buys a new lipstick called “Hawaiian Fire” she’s almost too embarrassed to say the name aloud in front of the clerk. But we begin to suspect what lies under her nondescript exterior just a few pages into the novel, when Barbara sends her out to a dinner party. Barbara loved writing dinner party scenes, for they allowed her to put home cooking right up front where everyone could interact with it. Not that Mildred or anybody else at the table would have called this event a “dinner party”—it’s a plain family supper at the vicarage, and Mildred, who has dined there often, knows just what to expect.
I sat down at the table without any very high hopes, for both Julian and Winifred, as is often the way with good, unworldly people, hardly noticed what they ate or drank, so that a meal with them was a doubtful pleasure. Mrs. Jubb, who might have been quite a good cook with any encouragement, must have lost heart long ago. 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.
A. N. Wilson singles out this meal as a study in drabness, which it surely is. But notice how Mildred experiences the food. It is clear that she has a palate and that she can size up the defects in what she’s eating. She understands that life holds much better versions of macaroni cheese than the pale blob in front of her. There’s an implication, at least if we read between the lines, that she makes an excellent macaroni cheese hers
elf. (Maybe hers is like the one Evelyn Board included in her 1952 cookbook, The Right Way to His Heart, which begins: “This uncompromisingly English dish is one of our great national stand-bys, and very good it is, too.” Board’s directions are to prepare a “rich cheese sauce, not forgetting to stir in a spoonful of French mustard,” then mix it with the cooked macaroni and top everything with grated cheese, bread crumbs, and melted butter—“far better than dotting it with little bits.” Bake until “sizzling and golden.”) Later in the novel we find that Mildred keeps a Chinese cookbook by the bedside to read when she can’t fall asleep. And by the time she starts washing the lettuce and sprinkling olive oil over it for lunch with Rocky, we can see that here is a spinster very capable of meeting the world on pleasurable terms. Bland macaroni may be dinner, but it’s not her doom.
Mildred was the only one of Barbara’s heroines who had to put up with rationing, both at home and in restaurants. The women in all her other books were free to eat as they chose, and most of them cook well and easily. In fact, they seem quite unaware that they’re turning out meals of a quality that was supposed to be unheard-of in postwar England. Catherine, for instance, the bohemian writer in Less Than Angels, is an expert cook whose hands “sometimes smelled of garlic.” She can throw together a risotto at short notice and always has a bottle of inexpensive wine on hand. Making bœuf à la mode one day: “Oh, what joy to get a real calf’s foot from the butcher, she thought, and not to have to cheat by putting in gelatine.” Then there’s Dulcie in No Fond Return of Love. She likes bottled mayonnaise and has been known to drink orange squash with supper, but she also puts up the fruit from her garden every year, makes her own marmalade, roasts lamb “to perfection” with sprigs of rosemary, and for company sets out a roast duckling and a bottle of Clos Vougeot 1952. Leonora, in The Sweet Dove Died, is older than most Pym heroines, a fragile figure touched with pathos. But she, too, is an accomplished cook—chicken tarragon, chocolate mousse, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding, all beautifully prepared and served. Even in Quartet in Autumn, where most of the food reflects the narrow, often lonely circumstances of the four main characters, there’s a woman trying to woo the local vicar with poulet niçoise. She serves it with a good Orvieto.
What She Ate Page 18