Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952)

After reading her first novel quite some while ago, it is great to be back visiting Pym. From memory, the previous one was set in a village in the country, whereas this is set in London, so quite a change of milieu. Clearly, she is famed for her investigation of what could be described as the smallness or seeming incompleteness of women's lives mid-twentieth century, and this one is an example of that. Equally obviously, one of her great claims is in how she makes humour from that purportedly limited material, and there's no questioning that here! This one's space is placed amongst the attendees and surrounds of an urban London church in 1945. The main character, Mildred Lathbury, knows herself to be one of the 'excellent women' who formed the backbone of a church's community back then when the church was a great deal more alive. That world presided over by the vicar and including bazaars and fetes as fundraisers is very much her locale, but she is also aware of herself in it as seen from the outside, at least to some extent. She knows that she might appear disappointing to a more romantic, or deep-living individual, and her connection to that wider world comes from imagination, poetry and occasional spurs of contact with more travelled types. She accedes in seeing herself with some disenchantment, definitely, but is keenly realistic about what someone of her nature can stand, or manage. Pym allows us to see this in quite a lot of detail; my suspicion being that the depiction is one of herself, give or take a bit. This combination of faithfulness to the details of the somewhat strictured life, where she appears to celebrate its limitations and delight in the minority of its concerns, with quietly sly undercutting of their constraining smallness through tossed-off satiric swipes, is the adroit stuff of the Pym mixture. This one centres around a couple who move in on the floor below Mildred. Rockingham (Rocky) is a handsome and effusively charming officer, just back from the war in Italy, whom Mildred imagines as having charmed a swathe of lonely Wrens at his villa, and Helena is a semi-glamorous looking anthropologist who hasn't seen Rocky consistently for the duration, and has got on with her academic life as best she can, including very possibly some amorous adventures. Mildred is careful around them, as they seem so urbane and worldly. Through visits to Helena's learned society, meetings with various unmarried and possibly eligible males, frugal meals, both out and in, in the rationed restriction of these spare new days of freedom, a drama with the vicar and an entrapping widow, and gossip with her associates among the bevy of excellent women who keep the whole edifice moving, Mildred's preparedness to help, occasional social uncertainty and wry self-criticism are well-exercised. Also given a workout is dry reproval of not only the smallness of mind necessary for such a life, but also of the more expansive romantic silliness to which she is largely immune. Attitudes to the should and shouldn't of things are compassed with forgiving fascination and zest by Mildred as she is given more of an education in how others live. Though I couldn't possibly survive on a diet of this shade alone, I cannot but acknowledge its penetrating intelligence, and saving comedy.

Commonplace Book

'"...you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that - you must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit you at all - you're too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views - that's your great illusion, my dear. But we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all - not even yourself."'

from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Chapter 20)

Commonplace Book

'...She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case - it had not seemed to her in other cases - that the actual completely expressed. But she often reminded herself that there were essential reasons why one's ideal could never become concrete. It was a thing to believe in, not to see - a matter of faith, not of experience. Experience, however, might supply us with very creditable imitations of it, and the part of wisdom was to make the best of these...'

from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Chapter 19)

In Search of Lost Books by Giorgio van Straten (2016)

I suspect that this may have more clout in the original Italian. It strikes me that there are attempts here to render little bursts of poetic prose into English, alongside a majority which feels in English a bit ordinary. I don't know Italian, but my feeling is that there is perhaps a simple strain in it which retains poetry, but whose terms are not replicable, or not easily anyway. The subject matter is always of interest - the 'lost' novels of major writers, whose manuscripts were left on a train / burnt in a house fire / got rid of by a vicious ex, etc etc. The examples here are largely the obvious ones: Hemingway's juvenilia, Lowry's second novel, Plath's last, and so on. The likelihood is that a couple of them still exist; Bruno Schulz's is probably in old KGB files somewhere, or has been 'moved on' through various owners post the Soviet breakup; Plath's may well be amongst the papers Ted Hughes left to the University of Georgia, which cannot be looked at until 2022. The quality of these essays varies wildly, from a repellently flippant one on Hemingway, and a really silly one on Byron, to the tender one on Schulz, and a revealing stab at Walter Benjamin. On the whole it feels a bit too much on the light side, almost like it's a capitalisation on the books-on-books craze which seems to be current, which appears to have its monuments, but also a lot of dross. Perhaps, if I could read Italian, I would find here much more than this translation advertises.

Commonplace Book

'"And that's not the worst," she went on, rummaging in a small desk which stood open and seemed to be full of old newspapers. "Read this." She handed me a cutting headed OWL BITES WOMAN, from which I read that an owl had flown in through a cottage window one evening and bitten a woman on the chin. "And this," she went on, handing me another cutting which told how a swan had knocked a girl off her bicycle. "What do you think of that?"

"Oh, I suppose they were just accidents," I said.

"Accidents! Even Miss Jessop agrees that they are rather more than accidents, don't you, Miss Jessop?"

Miss Jessop made a quavering sound which might have been "Yes" or "No" but it was not allowed to develop into speech, for Mrs. Bone broke in by telling Everard that Miss Jessop wouldn't want any sherry.

"The Dominion of the Birds," she went on. "I very much fear it may come to that."'

from Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (Chapter Sixteen)

Commonplace Book

'...She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity. Mrs Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased. This way of her own, of which she was so fond, was not intrinsically offensive - it was just unmistakably distinguished from the way of others...'

from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Chapter 3)

But Not for Love: Stories of Marjorie Barnard and M. Barnard Eldershaw (1988)

This volume seems to have been the first fruit of a career spent in trying to keep returning these writers to the public consciousness. Robert Darby is the one keeping up the fight, but even he has now seriously diversified into other interests, though he appears to still be occasionally venturing into this territory. It was published the year after Marjorie Barnard died (and thirty-odd years after Flora Eldershaw's death). What is collected here is most of what was not yet in book form in their work in the short story. Barnard Eldershaw had planned a short story volume in the early 30s which was rejected around the traps of London. Barnard on her own published a magnificent one in Australia only in 1943, The Persimmon Tree, which Virago republished with a couple of extras thrown in in the 80s. An Australian publisher had planned another in 1949 / 1950, which also never eventuated. This volume collects most of what seems from research to have been the proposed contents of the two stillborn volumes, to complement the Virago reprint which was newly available at the time of publication. Darby gives a fascinating history of all the background of publication of various of the stories, why others were rejected, and, most importantly, the attitude of Barnard and Eldershaw to story-writing, and that of the literary world around them. It is astonishing how wrong a lot of people got these stories, including the authors - proof, if more were needed, that writers themselves are not always the best judges of their work from a public perspective. That said, Barnard always seems to have had a special place for the short story in her heart, and despite seeming to droop under the criticism of Vance or Nettie Palmer (for example), kept up her fascination with the form. Eldershaw, as usual, seems a far less easy-to-decipher individual. These stories have a lot of hurt in them, a stormy colour, and troubled contemporary settings which didn't sit well I'm sure with the more larrikinesque bush-yarn expectations of a good number of punters. That they portray the greeny-grey disturbed skies of modern 30s and 40s city life, and its concomitant nervous disorders and banjaxing frustrations, is what brought to them continual criticism of depressiveness, and is what now makes them so wonderful as a vision of alterity to the traditional picture. Add to that the particular and revealing talent of these two writers, who are still not accorded their due, and one has a book filled with rich layering and significance.