As we avid readers and book lovers know, there are novels and novels—suspense, romance, adventure, spy thriller, science fiction, mystery, fantasy, and numerous others. Each reader has particular tastes, one of which may include novels of manners. The works of Jane Austen are the shining light of this genre.
In the twentieth century one of the best known writers in this particular category was the late Barbara Pym. Today we’ll discuss what I consider the dominant peculiarity of Pym’s books, which is the extremely low sex drive of the characters.
The first Pym novel I reread was Excellent Women, her second to be published. In this we meet Miss Mildred Lathbury, not long past the age of 30, but already firmly on the shelf.
The time is post-World War II England, a particularly dreary time in English history. Government-imposed austerity, including rationing, is still in force. Mildred, a clergyman’s daughter, works part-time for a society that helps distressed gentlewomen. She spends the rest of the time being one of the excellent women who help out at the Anglo-Catholic church she attends. (Anglo-Catholic is equivalent to high church Episcopal in the USA.) She is particularly good friends with Julian, the rector, and his sister, Winifred.
Reading Pym is almost like traveling back in a time machine. In this deadly dull postwar society, the excellent women do all the work of organizing appropriate flowers for the church services, polishing the brasses in the church, and collecting items for the annual church jumble sale. The men of the parish do absolutely nothing except sit and drink tea brewed by the women. The men in Pym’s novels are in general perfectly useless, incapable of even going to the larder to take out bread and cheese for lunch. Sister Winifred “makes a home” for Julian, who has no wife to perform this service for him.
Mildred hankers a bit after Julian but understands that since she is on the shelf and Julian preoccupied with his religious duties, there is no hope of marriage or of anything beyond friendship. But wait! A lodger—an attractive widow—moves into the rectory with Julian and Winifred and presto, she and Julian become engaged.
Poor Mildred, deprived of her little rectory suppers with Julian and Winifred, creeps back to her flat. For amusement on Saturday night she occupies herself with needlework and listening to the wireless. Ye gods—imagine staying home hookin’ rugs on a Saturday night instead of going out and hookin’ up! One must conclude that modern life, for all its manifold problems, offers the unmarried a damned sight better time. (Of course, the England of 1946 was also Before the Pill.)
In the course of the novel Mildred becomes involved, if one can call it that, with Everard, an anthropologist. They attend lunchtime services at the same church, one side of which is still in ruins from the war. One evening Everard rings up Mildred to say he’s got some meat and plans to cook it that evening—would she like to come to dinner? One must remember that this was a time when whale steaks, rabbit, and the like were on offer at the butcher’s shop. No wonder Everard felt that his acquisition and planned cooking of meat was an occasion to celebrate.
Mildred, however, fears that it will be she who ends up cooking the meat and she just doesn’t feel up to it, so she declines.
The charm of Pym’s books, it must be said, lie in her witty narration of the story, not the plot. Nothing much happens in Excellent Women except that Julian discovers the widow to be false, said widow decamps to try her luck with the next defenseless male, and peace prevails at the rectory once more. Being told by a male neighbor, Rocky, time and time again that she is pretty and charming, Mildred almost begins to believe it herself. She begins to use a little makeup and buys a new dress or two.
On a later occasion she does accept an invitation to dinner in Everard’s flat. The evening ends with Everard popping the question. But what question? Is it, “Will you marry me, Mildred?” Oh, no. It’s “Will you proofread the galleys of my book and compile an index? I don’t feel like doing it myself, one is so busy with this and that.”
Mildred the Milquetoast agrees, feebly, that she supposes she could learn to do these things. She reflects that no doubt after the proofreading is done she will find herself doing the washing up. Then she thinks of Julian at the rectory, on whom an eye must be kept. What with one thing and another, she reflects, she may well end up having what people call “a full life.”
The characters in Excellent Women exist—they cannot be said to live—in a straitjacket of societal expectations. Of course, more options have always been open to the rich, but in that day and time Mildred, the impoverished gentlewoman who happened to be a clergyman’s daughter, appeared to lack both options and the will to create her own options. With the world recovering from a major war, it perhaps would not have been easy to jump aboard a tramp steamer and go wherever the cargo went, disembarking weeks later at some exotic port of call. However, some travel occurred—the anthropologists were traveling to and returning from Africa, after all. Mildred, driven by respectability rather than sex, accepts the stupefying boredom of her life without question.
Moving on to A Few Green Leaves, the last of Pym’s novels, we find Emma, an anthropologist (also a spinster past the age of 30) moving into a village in order to observe the inhabitants. The time is the late 1970s, so in this respect Emma is slightly better off than poor Mildred: Emma at least has been trained for a profession, there is television to beguile the lonely evenings, and one can take cheap holidays in sunny Greece and Spain rather than suffering through a damp grey English summer. With afternoon walks through the village, morning coffees in aid of charity, and various other village activities, Emma finds plenty to observe. In addition Graham, a man with whom she had a brief relationship years ago, takes a house in the village to finish his book, and Tom, the handsome but widowed rector, is abandoned by his lesbian sister Daphne, who sets up housekeeping with her significant other in a distant village. Tom is attracted to Emma, but not enough to do anything about it; Graham imposes one demand after another on her, mostly concerning food. Between bringing him casseroles for dinner and making bramble jelly for Tom, she hardly has a moment to herself.
So matters proceed, with Emma and both men too inhibited to make any sort of move toward a deeper relationship. Graham finishes his book and goes back to London, possibly to make up with his ex-wife. Emma continues to observe village life, and Tom, utterly useless as a rector, continues to poke about in the woods looking for the remains of a lost medieval village. In fact history, rather than religion, is Tom’s bag. At length, however, Emma’s mother Beatrix, who owns the cottage in which Emma is living, returns to size up the situation. She decides that Daphne, who has come back to the village to see how Tom is getting on without her, must be discouraged from returning permanently to “make a home” for him. This, Beatrix thinks, will leave an opening for Tom to come to his senses and marry Emma. The book ends with Tom and Emma having a friendly conversation that may lead to a life-changing relationship. Or then again, it may not.
In reading Pym’s novels the conclusion is inescapable that the dithery, on-the-shelf, not-very-significant women she writes about are mirror images of herself. Shy, awkward, not skilled at earning a living and certainly not in forming relationships with the opposite sex, her heroines, though well-educated, though possessed of mordant wit, bumble through life without expecting very much--in fact, the adage "Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed" is particularly pertinent to Pym's protagonists.
Pym's work fell out of fashion, which discouraged her from trying to publish again for a long time. Luckily, in 1977 poet Philip Larkin and David Cecil brought it to the attention of the reading world that Pym was vastly underrated. People began reading and delighting in her novels; she was invited to various literary events and her work became much better known. Alexander McCall Smith, himself no mean purveyor of gentle humor, wrote a short but laudatory article in The Guardian about her.
Alas, I did not have time to reread the entirety of Pym’s work, so I failed to rediscover the passage that haunts me to this day. It seems that a wife desired to help her mother sort offerings for the church jumble sale, so her husband dropped her off at her mother’s house in the village to accomplish this task. It was meant to be one evening’s worth of effort. However, a year later she was still living at her mother’s house: he’d forgotten to go pick her up.
Forgotten? I mean, didn’t he want any hot dinners, clean shirts, and the bedroom bennies a wife usually provides? And she didn’t object to being forgotten? She couldn’t have walked home?
The lack of passion among these villagers leaves one speechless; nay, more than speechless, positively slack-jawed and goggle-eyed. Rereading Pym’s work, in which people live completely uneventful lives dominated by attendance or nonattendance at Evensong and the yearly jumble sale, makes me grateful to live when and where I do. And Pym’s books leave this reader, at least, with one overarching question—how did they reproduce? Because no one ever has sex in these books!