An anchor gave to me.
Then an old prayer-book I did present:
And he an optick sent.
With that I gave a viall full of tears:
But he a few green eares:
Ah Loyterer! I’le no more, no more I’le bring:
I did expect a ring.
The book, in her accustomed manner, is both elegiac and hopeful. It gives a sense of pity for lost opportunities, but at the same time a courageous opening to the future.
High comedy needs a settled world, ready to resent disturbance, and in her nine novels Barbara Pym stuck serenely to the one she knew best: quiet suburbs, obscure office departments, villages where the neighbours could be observed through the curtains, and, above all, Anglican parishes. (Even as a child at school she had written stories about curates.) This meant that the necessary confrontations must take place at cold Sunday suppers, little gatherings, visits, funerals, and so on, which Barbara Pym, supremely observant in her own territory, was able to convert into a battleground. Here, even without intending it, a given character is either advancing or retreating: you have, for instance, an unfair advantage if your mother is dead, ‘just a silver-framed photograph,’ over someone whose mother lives in Putney. And in the course of the struggle strange fragments of conversation float to the surface, lyrical moments dear to Barbara Pym.
‘An anthropophagist,’ declared Miss Doggett in an authoritative tone. ‘He does some kind of scientific work, I believe.’
‘I thought it meant a cannibal—someone who ate human flesh,’ said Jane in wonder.
‘Well, science has made such strides,’ said Miss Doggett doubtfully.
Or:
‘Well, he is a Roman Catholic priest, and it is not usual for them to marry, is it?’
‘No, of course they are forbidden to,’ Miss Foresight agreed.
‘Still, Miss Lydgate is much taller than he is,’ she added.
In such exchanges the victory is doubtful: indeed, Miss Doggett and Miss Foresight are, in their way, invincible.
As might be expected, however, of such a brilliant comic writer, the issues are not comic at all. Three kinds of conflict recur throughout Barbara Pym’s novels: growing old (on which she concentrated in the deeply touching Quartet in Autumn); hanging on to some kind of individuality, however crushed, however dim; and adjusting the vexatious distance between men and women. These, indeed, are novels without heroes. The best that can be put forward is the Vicar in Jane and Prudence, ‘beamy and beaky, kindly looks and spectacles,’ and, as his wife accepts, more than somewhat childish. If men are less than angels, Barbara Pym’s men are rather less than men, not wanting much more than constant attention and comfort. Their theses must be typed, surplices washed, endless dinners cooked, remarks listened to ‘with an expression of strained interest,’ and the forces of nature and society combine to ensure, even in the 1980s, that they get these things. Women see through them clearly enough, but are drawn towards them by their own need and by a compassion which is taken entirely for granted. Men are allowed, indeed conditioned, to deceive themselves to the end, and are loved as self-deceivers.
Women have their resource—the romantic imagination. This faculty, which Jane Austen (and James Joyce, for that matter) considered so destructive, is the secret ‘richness’ of Barbara Pym’s heroines. ‘Richness’ is a favourite word. It means plenty of human behaviour to observe, leading to a wildly sympathetic flight of fancy into the past and future. Of course, one must come down to earth, the tea must be made, reason takes over: but the happiness remains. Richness can defeat even loneliness. In The Sweet Dove Died pampered Leonora, on a visit to Keats House, looks in astonishment at a faded middle-aged woman with a bag full of library books, ‘on top of which lay the brightly-coloured packet of a frozen dinner for one…And now she caught a glimpse of her [the woman’s] face, plain but radiant, as she looked up from one of the glass cases that held the touching relics. There were tears on her cheeks.’
Barbara Pym nevertheless guards against sentimentality. She is the writer who points out ‘the desire to do good without much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us,’ the regrettable things said between friends and ‘the satisfaction which is to be got from saying precisely things of that kind,’ the irritation we feel ‘when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they perform a kind action.’ But towards her characters she shows a creator’s charity. She understands them so well that the least she can do is to forgive them.
For A Few Green Leaves she has moved back from the London of her last two novels to the country. Here, too, she has always taken a straight look. Why is it always assumed that English women must ‘love’ the country, and be partial to dead birds and rabbits, and to cruel village gossip? Why are those who dig the garden and keep goats called ‘splendid’? But, at the same time, this is Oxfordshire, the ‘softly undulating landscape, mysterious woods, and ancient stone buildings’ where Barbara Pym herself spent her last years.
The heroine, Emma Howick, who does not mean to settle there permanently, undertakes some quiet research into her fellow creatures (rather like Dulcie in No Fond Return of Love). The original inhabitants of the village have withdrawn to a council estate on the outskirts, leaving the stone cottages to elderly ladies and professional people. Here she begins her field notes. Changes in village life are a gift to the ironist, but Barbara Pym has placed such changes—seen partly through Emma’s eyes and partly through her own—in relation to an unexpected point, the human need for healing. The almost empty church confronts the well-attended surgery (Tuesdays and Thursdays). ‘There was nothing in churchgoing to equal that triumphant moment when you came out of the surgery clutching the ritual scrap of paper.’ The lazy old senior partner is ‘beloved,’ the junior partner’s wife schemes to move into the Rectory, far too large and chilly for the widowed Reverend Thomas Dagnall. Even a discarded tweed coat of the young doctor’s is handed separately to the Bring and Buy, ‘as if a touch could heal.’ But when, in the closing pages, he is obliged to tell a woman patient that her days are numbered—for it’s no good trying to hide the truth from an intelligent person—‘she had come back at him by asking if he believed in life after death. For a moment he had been stunned into silence, indignant at such a question.’ In this indignation we get a glimpse, no more than that, of a pattern that Barbara Pym chose to express only in terms of comedy.
The story proceeds from Low Sunday to New Year through delightful set pieces—a Hunger Lunch, a Flower Festival, blackberry picking (but the hedges turn out to have been ‘done’ already). Tom and Emma must draw together, that’s clear enough. Both of them feel the unwanted freedom of loneliness. Daphne, Tom’s tough-looking elder sister, is yet another romantic:
‘One goes on living in the hope of seeing another spring,’ Daphne said with a rush of emotion. ‘And isn’t that a patch of violets?’ She pointed to a twist of purple on the ground, no rare spring flower or even the humblest violet, but the discarded wrapping of a chocolate bar, as Tom was quick to point out.
‘Oh, but there’ll soon be bluebells in these woods—another reason for surviving the winter,’ she went on. Young Dr Shrubsole moved away from her, hoping she had not noticed his withdrawal.
Who can say which of them, in the satirist’s sense, is right? In the same way, the villagers intimidate the gentry, and the old are intimidated by the young, who preserve them and educate them in healthy living and make them carry saccharine ‘in a little decorated container given by one of the grandchildren’—but in both cases Barbara Pym gently divides her sympathy. We have to keep alert, because she will never say exactly what we expect. The ‘few green leaves’ of the title come from a remark of Miss Grundy’s, made to Tom, who reflects how often these elderly women give him quite unconsciously ideas for a sermon: ‘He made up his mind not to use them.’
Through all Barbara Pym’s work there is a consistency of texture as well as of background. She has described
the texture herself as ‘pain, amusement, surprise, resignation.’ This makes it possible for characters to stray out of their own novel into another: in A Few Green Leaves, for example, we hear about the funeral of Miss Clovis from Less Than Angels. The valedictory note cannot be missed. But once again the ending is an encounter with hope as Emma determines to stay in the village ‘and even to embark on a love affair which need not necessarily be an unhappy one.’
London Review of Books, 1980
A Character in One of God’s Dreams
Reality and Dreams, by Muriel Spark
When Dame Muriel Spark began to write fiction—reluctantly, it seems—the novel was in an interesting condition, very conscious of itself and given to experiments with time and place and to asking the reader to question the whole business of truth and invention. In her first novel, The Comforters (1957), the heroine, who is writing her first novel, finds that she and her characters are being written into a first novel by someone else. This pretence (if that is what it is), that the book is a kind of game, suited her exactly, and still does. As she writes it, it is an enthralling game, and deadly serious.
She has pointed out that it wasn’t until she became a Roman Catholic, in 1954, that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do. Good and evil, and the state of play between them, can be made clear (though not simplified), she found, by looking at a small community. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie takes place in a select Edinburgh girls’ school. At the centre of Memento Mori is a ward (aged patients, female) in a London hospital. The Abbess of Crewe, written at the time of the Watergate scandal, takes place in a convent on up-to-date lines, where the bugging system is controlled from a statue of the Infant of Prague in the Abbess’s parlour. The Girls of Slender Means presents young women living in a respectable hostel as World War II comes to an end. They will not escape violence, however. An unexploded bomb is buried in the garden.
This is the kind of apparently gross injustice, in the form of brutal interruptions to the smooth-running narrative, that you expect from Evelyn Waugh and still more from E. M. Forster. In Dame Muriel’s stories these interruptions are a reminder of the vast unseen presences on which our lives are dependent or contingent. In Memento Mori, eighty-one-year-old Bettie, who has been a distinguished penal reformer, is battered to death by a casual thief. Dull, blameless Mavis, in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, gets stabbed to death with a corkscrew. It’s not for us to distinguish between the tragic and the ridiculous.
‘He often wondered if we were all characters in one of God’s dreams.’ That is how Dame Muriel begins her latest novel, her twentieth, Reality and Dreams. We’re in yet another closed area, the movies. ‘He’ is Tom, a successful if somewhat old-fashioned film director—an auteur, really, who writes his own screenplays. It sounds as if he might be in search of spiritual truth, but the author soon disillusions us. He has just recovered consciousness in an expensive clinic after a nasty accident on the set. He has fallen off a giant crane, breaking twelve ribs and a hip. Cranes, as his assistant pointed out, are quite unnecessary these days, but Tom had wanted to feel godlike. From the marvellously written, half delirious opening sequence we get the impression of a man who has been hopelessly spoiled. Like both Miss Jean Brodie and the Abbess of Crewe, he is fond of poetry, and this may redeem him a little—not much, though.
Tom’s wife is Claire, easygoing and rich. (Dame Muriel has always faced unflinchingly the difference money makes.) He has two daughters, the beautiful Cora, from his first marriage, and, with Claire, the plain, hostile, alarming Marigold. Marigold is a mean-minded sociologist, without warmth, without ‘magnificence,’ in Aristotle’s sense. Such people are not tolerated by Dame Muriel, who has demolished them in earlier books.
Marigold appears early on in Reality and Dreams as Tom’s bedside visitor: ‘“Don’t wear yourself out,” she said, “with too much conversation. I bought you some grapes.” She said “bought” not “brought.” She dumped a plastic bag on the side table. “This is a wonderful clinic,” she said. “I suppose it costs a fortune. Of course nothing should be spared in a case like yours.”’
You must not imagine Marigold was particularly deprived. Her last remark should remind Tom, if he could hear it, that he is in the hands of an all-knowing narrator, sometimes gentle, sometimes cutting, sometimes even malicious, but always elegant. But Tom thinks that he himself is a creator. About his fellow human beings his question is always: What could I cast them as? How can I make them less real? The film he is making is about a nobody, a girl he had once seen on a trip through France as she was serving out hamburgers at a campsite. In the film she becomes a millionairess overnight. ‘Do you think,’ he asks Dave, his private cabdriver, ‘that she would know what to do with that sort of money? Would she ever learn?’ Dave replies that that would depend on what kind of person she was, but this means nothing to Tom. She will only exist as part of his work of art. Then she will be irreplaceable.
Will Tom’s egocentricity—his pride, to give his sin a name—lead him to another fall? It proves ruinous, not to him, but to others. As a result of the hostility he stirs up around him—‘“It’s so very difficult,” said Tom, “to realize that one makes enemies, especially in one’s family”’—Dave gets shot at and wounded, and there is another hideous accident with the giant crane. But Tom himself flourishes. The Hamburger Girl does quite well, and he has an idea for another film, about a Celt in Roman Britain who foresees the future. Admittedly it sounds terrible; however, he finds the money to make it. In the meantime, many of the other characters have lost their jobs—so many that they form a group, like the old or the sick. Tom’s brother has been laid off in a company downsizing campaign, so has his day nurse’s husband, so have both his daughters, both his sons-in-law, Marigold’s brother-in-law (from an international electronics firm), and Dave’s brother-in-law (let go from a pizza bar). We live in a world where millions find themselves unwanted overnight, expended, like casualties of the century’s wars.
This is the dispiriting fact. But the ironic quotation that accompanies Tom throughout the book is the first line of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘Let us go then, you and I.’ In the Eliot poem Prufrock ends up in a sea dream, where if human voices wake him, he will drown. Tom knows that at best he inhabits a ‘tract of no man’s land between dreams and reality.’ About redundancy in the work force, all that he can say is ‘Nobody fires a man if he is exceptionally good.’ It is as if he couldn’t risk too much sympathy, or even too much good sense. His profession, as he admits, is not ordinary life. ‘But let me tell you that for people in the film business, yes, it is life.’
His comment on the second disaster with the crane—a death, this time—is ‘I’m glad the film is coming to an end. We’re just about ready to wrap it up.’ But we’re made to feel that he is considerably shaken. What’s more, he is left with a consoler. This Dame Muriel rarely does in her fiction. (Job’s unsatisfactory comforters are the metaphor of a whole novel, The Only Problem.) But Tom is left with his wife, Claire, who is calm and affectionate, quite unmoved by his infidelities and indeed by her own. He can feel her strength and courage sustaining him as the story closes, leaving nothing more to be said.
Dame Muriel is as enigmatic in this novel, as distinct, as relentlessly observant of human habits and unguarded moments as she has ever been. Reality and Dreams is very short but, as she pointed out twenty years ago in an interview with Frank Kermode, it’s no good putting a pint of beer in a small glass. ‘I think the best thing is to be conscious of everything that one writes,’ she told him, ‘and let the unconscious take care of itself, if it exists, which we don’t know…The best thing is to know what you are doing, I think.’
New York Times Book Review, 1997
The Great Importance of Small Things
The Collected Stories of John McGahern
Perhaps John McGahern’s classic short stories should be read as nearly as possible at one sitting. In that way y
ou could watch the images and the characters recur and echo one another. In ‘Wheels,’ the first story in this collection, the speaker (who never gives his name) goes back home from Dublin on his yearly leave from the office to help on the farm. ‘I knew the wheel,’ he says—that is, the turning wheel of Time and Nature. ‘Fathers become children to their sons,’ and his own father, aggressively swallowing his food at the kitchen table, has turned into ‘a huge old child’ to his stepmother Rose. Meanwhile, he himself has drifted away from the shining upper reaches of childhood without ever reaching the destination he hoped for. He can evoke past summers only by putting on his old work clothes, kept ready for him, and helping to bring in the hay. His weak bully of a father nags at him to take over the land. But in ‘Gold Watch,’ when he comes back with the young woman he wants to marry, the old couple have rented out the meadows and there is no haymaking to be done. And in ‘Sierra Leone,’ Rose dies and we are faced with yet another possible ending.
In ‘Wheels,’ the battle within the family (fought almost in silence), the balance of power between men and women, the nostalgia for a cheerless country childhood, all put us straight into McGahern’s Ireland. Life on the land (oats and potatoes) or in the sawmill or the creamery is tedious enough. At the day’s end there is scarcely anything to relate, except ‘the shape of a story that had as much reason to go on as to stop.’ No one conceals his excitement when a cow falls on its back or a neighbour tries (unsuccessfully) to hang himself from a branch. But ‘all of all of life turns away from its eventual hopelessness and finds refuge in the importance of small things,’ and of these McGahern is a connoisseur. Take his description of the barman who helps himself to a whiskey only when his wife, at the other end of the room, isn’t looking. The way he watches her is ‘beautiful in its concentration, reflecting each move or noise she made as clearly as water will drifting clouds.’ McGahern has every respect for these ‘small acts of ceremony.’ Repetition makes them almost sacred, memory gives them a second life. In ‘A Slip-up,’ an old farmer, left by his wife to wait outside a supermarket, remembers minute by minute the work he would have been doing if he’d been allowed to keep the land—clearing, draining, fencing. ‘The hard way is the only way.’
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