Pym and proper

Author Barbara Pym. (Courtesy St. Hilda's College, University of Oxford)

Daffodils are starting to push up and the sky is a swirl of robin egg blue and milky white. It’s the first weekend of spring — and I have elected to spend every minute of it inside an airless auditorium. The Barbara Pym Society in North America is holding its ninth annual conference at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass., and I feel as though I have spent my entire life counting down the days until I would meet other card-carrying Pym fanatics.

The society’s website promises a weekend of back-to-back lectures and discussions. When I e-mailed the group’s president, Ellen Miller, to make sure the program wasn’t geared to scholars, she assured me it wasn’t. “It is a very warm, inclusive, and non-academic environment,” she wrote. “The atmosphere is one of instant friendship!”

Barbara Pym might not be the best writer to have ever graced the earth, but she’s at the top of my list. I discovered her three years ago, by accident, when I was stuck in a tiny beach house with a dyspeptic boyfriend whose head I was about to tear off. When I finished whatever book I’d brought with me, I combed our host’s bookshelves and found The Sweet Dove Died. Three hours later, when I had come to the final page, my mood had drastically improved.

Her 12 novels are intricate comedies that thrum with life’s awkward moments and ordinary people’s peculiarities. In Quartet in Autumn, for instance, Pym introduces 60-something Marcia by showing her visiting the library on her lunch hour. “The library was also a good place to dispose of unwanted objects which could not in her opinion be classified as rubbish suitable for the dustbin,” Pym writes.

Pym’s self-contained world is populated by bumbling anthropologists, average vicars who think rather highly of themselves and her trademark “excellent women” — intelligent spinsters whose lives tend to be a succession of tidying up, developing crushes on handsome men of indeterminate sexuality and attending jumble sales. But the most winsome aspect of her work is her ability to weave her characters’ innermost thoughts throughout the text, and to show how our minds constantly wander to the most foolish places.

Born in Shropshire, England, in 1913, Pym knew from the get-go she wanted to be a writer. She was an assiduous journal keeper and after graduating from Oxford in 1934 she returned to her parents’ home, where she spent the next year writing Some Tame Gazelle, a tale of two 50-something spinsters based on her sister Hilary and herself. She continued to write until 1940, when war overwhelmed Europe, and she went to work in the Censorship office in Briston, then joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service. In 1950, a revised version of Some Tame Gazelle was accepted by the publisher Jonathan Cape and she went on to produce 11 more books before she died in 1980.

Excellent Women is her only novel still in print. This might explain why at this conference of more than 80 Pym fans, I am only one of three attendees under the age of 40. There are a handful of men here, one of whom has never read a Pym novel and has come to escort his wife.

Attendees at the ninth annual Barbara Pym Conference, held at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. (Sherrie Saint John)

On the first night, I show up at the law school’s student lounge to find a gaggle of older people dressed in tweeds and shawls and highly geometric amulets. More than one person cries, “So nice to have a young person here!” I overhear a conversation about people’s plans for this summer’s conference in Oxford, which is put on by the Barbara Pym Society in the U.K. Several diehards routinely do both conferences every year.

“It’s totally different in Oxford,” says Eleanor Biber, a vivacious white-haired woman from Vienna who just got her PhD on Pym. “They choose a different book to focus on every year, and you can visit the home Barbara and Hilary lived in.”

Some people seem to take pleasure in the prim and proper ultra-Englishness of Pym’s world; it’s her humour that does it for others. And then there’s the appeal of Pym’s own story, which is of a piece with her fiction. In 1963, when she submitted her seventh book, An Unsuitable Attachment, she was told by Jonathan Cape it was out of joint with the times. Her manuscript was turned down by 19 other publishers.

During the period referred to by her fans as the “wilderness years,” Pym continued to write and receive rejection slips. It was quite the shock then, when, in 1977, she was named the most “underrated novelist of the century” in the Times Literary Supplement by Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin. Quartet in Autumn, her book about four office workers on the verge of retirement, came out later that year, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Pym enjoyed a renewed celebrity for her remaining three years.

At dinner, I sit with the youngsters — Michael Simonson, 37, a sunny librarian from New York, and his friend Jean Thilmany, 40, a Minnesotan who wears Lennon glasses and also smiles a lot. Michael happened upon A Few Green Leaves at a used bookstore about 10 years ago. “I don’t read all that much fiction, but I loved the cover,” he says. “It had an oval with a woman’s silhouette. It was so old-fashioned.” After reading the book, he passed it on to Jean, who became a convert.

The rest of the dinner is spent sharing our favorite Pym moments and quotes. We giggle about one character’s African neighbour, who is always hosting singalongs, and the vicar from another book who’s fixated on what’s known as the “D.M.V,” the “deserted medieval village” near his home.

Michael looks tickled when I bump into him the next morning. “Remember how last night I was eating a chocolate-dipped strawberry and I said, ‘dessert medieval village’ instead of ‘deserted medieval village’? I was thinking about how Pymian that was. Isn’t that something one of her characters would do?”

Conference-goers listen intently during a Pym session. (Sherrie Saint John)

The room fills for our first event, a lecture on mothers and daughters by a mother-daughter academic duo. Once the lecture gets underway, many of my fellow Pym lovers knit contentedly. According to the program, one of the professors on stage gave a presentation here in 2004 on knitting in the life and work of Barbara Pym.

“Well, she didn’t knit exactly,” Sherrie Saint John, a conference regular, tells me. “But since so many of our members do, we thought it would be nice to be relevant. Besides, Barbara was an avid quilter, and her method of turning notes of overheard conversations into novels sort of relates to knitting — her notebooks were her yarn.”

The lunch that follows is boisterous — with most of the people here on return visits, there’s a great deal of catching up to do. I sit next to Yvonne Cocking. It turns out Cocking used to work at the same anthropological magazine as Pym. “She was rather quiet and dignified,” Cocking says. “I remember her sitting in a chair and smoking out of the side of her mouth.”

I also learn from Cocking that when Pym was in her early twenties, she took up with a young German soldier. “Ah yes,” sighs Cocking. “Friedbert.” I shudder at the thought of my hero cavorting with this young SS officer, and mentally scan her books for mentions of any Jews. I can think of none.

That afternoon, we are treated to a few more papers — one on the role of the radio in Pym’s life and work, another on the authors Pym must have read. We learn Pym didn’t limit her attention to Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope; her work was also informed by garden-variety popular fiction and church newsletters.

Finally, it’s time for movie hour. We’re shown Tea with Miss Pym, a BBC interview conducted just after she was nominated for the Booker. Ah, there she is, dragging lawn furniture out in front of her and her sister’s Finstock home! She looks like Julia Child’s bashful sister, and, as Yvonne Cocking excitedly points out, she’s wearing an outfit of her own making. “You can see for yourselves,” Cocking exclaims to the room. “It’s a dreadful skirt!”

Barbara speaks tentatively, all the while stroking her cat. She tells us very little that I don’t know — she wrote in the morning, she cobbled together overheard snippets and notes in her journals, and she was a solitary creature. “There’s very little you can do not to be lonely,” she says with a twisted smile.

Sunday morning, after the “What is a Pymmish mystery novel” and “Pym’s lessons for the fiction writer” lectures, comes the conference’s grand finale. Six attendees have been selected to re-enact Across a Crowded Room, a story of Pym’s about a 60-something woman whose ex-boyfriend fails to recognize her at a dinner party. The piece was published in The New Yorker in 1979, a year before Pym’s death.

The actors are fumbling with their papers and delivering their lines in their flat American accents. It’s all a bit preposterous, really, but the story soon comes to the fore. The piece is funny and gut-wrenching, and soon enough everyone in the audience is leaning forward. For the first time all weekend, everyone has put their knitting needles down.

After we’ve said our goodbyes, I walk through the campus with a funny feeling in my stomach. I’ve spent the past 48 hours getting to know Barbara better, and I can’t say I like her any more for it. My heart still belongs to her books, but I’m not sure I can maintain an imagined spiritual kinship with a dead woman I never met. I can forgive her for her foolishness, even her aloofness, but I can’t stop thinking about her years-long dalliance with Friedbert. If I return — and it’s very likely I will — it will be to catch up with friends. Which, come to think of it, is probably why everyone else keeps coming back.

Lauren Mechling is a New York writer and co-author of Foreign Exposure: The Social Climber Abroad.

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