| The word spinster in Pym's world is a word of identification: These are good women, sensible women, independent and dedicated to the service of said good works. Not for them are the joys of marriage and children. One would have to have the intelligence of a tea biscuit not to understand that neither do they expect sex. Though sex is an exquisitely woven red thread among the prosaic greys and blues in a daily embroidered text - never mentioned but there nonetheless.
Here is Anne Tyler on the subject:
While Jane Austin has always assumed the hero is worth the trouble, Barbara Pym harbors a good-humored suspicion that he isn't. [Reading Austin] you might think Pym was listening with just a shade too much tolerance, with the slightest suggestion of a smile. You might think she was hearing about some tribal superstition.
As anthropologists make up a goodly number of her male characters, along with clerics, this makes perfect sense. Her women sit along the sidelines making comments about the tribe of men, while the men think of women as quite useful in making indexes for the tomes they produce. All the while Pym's women are bearing down on the clueless men with the dispassionate eye of an anthropologist studying a rare African tribe.
Entering her serviceable grey wool world are two disruptions: The ultra charming Rockingham Napier, a former naval officer, and his wife, Helena, who move into the flat upstairs from her - and the vain, silly widow, Mrs. Gray, for whom Julian becomes besotted. She is a good foil for the rest of the women in the novel - poor woman doesn't have a chance. The Napiers especially will change Ms. Lathbury's life with a fierce (and funny, of course) force.
Mildred eventually meets Helena on the stairwell. They chat about this and that and Mildred surmises that she and Mrs. Napier are an unlikely pair. Helena Napier is a sharp witted (rapier/napier) "modern women." After a bit they decide in sharing the bathroom, Mildred will provide the toilet paper.
The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy burden.
Helena invites Mildred in for tea and Mildred notes the lovely china and pleasant biscuits - though they are set out in a haphazard way in the careless manner of a woman who has more important work (Helena is an anthropologist working on kinship tables - along with her colleague, Everard Bone, about whom we will speak more.)
Here, dear reader, I must call to your attention that this novel takes place immediately after the war when harsh food rationing is in force. This novel especially (but all her others as well)make a great fuss about tea and food. This is stoic writing - the passages about food (and there are many) are some of the funniest and most delicately presented. At no time - never - in her books does Pym call attention to the lack of food during the war or immediately thereafter, except in the most exquisite circumspect manner. Note also that Mildred usually reads cookbooks before she turns off the lights in bed.
At a Barbara Pym Society Meeting Dinner at Harvard several years ago, Hillary Pym, Barbara's surviving sister, turned to me and asked if I kept a food diary. I said no. "Oh my dear when you are travelling you must keep one - for the memories." I turned to my companion at my right and we smiled at the wondrous gift that was just handed to us.
Mildred's life is changing rapidly due to the Napiers and Everard Bone's various forays into the London nights. Everard seems to be courting Mildred in a restrained manner which is awkward for there is the slightest hint that he and Helena were once an (ahem) item. Rocky as well, a charmer in every sense of that word, finds Mildred endearing. These are heady days and nights for Ms. Lathbury.
In this new life, Mildred meets an odd assortment of eccentrics, all of whom cause merriment to the reader. Mrs. Bone, Everard's mother, who has a deep interest in woodworms. William, the brother of her best friend, who is distressed to move offices, as different pigeons whom he feeds come to the ledge outside his window; and Esther Clovis, the secretary of the Learned Society. Esther is the cause of one of the best lines in the novel. Mildred notes that Esther Clovis has hair like a dog. And Esther is doglike in her devotion to Helena.
One of the funniest scenes in the book is the occasion of Helena and Everard's reading of the Kinship Tables of some African Tribe at The Learned Society. It takes place at the food and drinks table where there is much jockeying for position and many unhappy academics who didn't get the food choices they wanted or enough of it. At another point, Rocky, Julian Malory, and Winifred Malory end up in Mildred's kitchen in the middle of the night while she makes tea.
Mildred is the funniest of Pym's characters and the most likeable. On the surface she is formal, self-effacing but her inner feisty spirit is always on. Eventually life does settle back to the comfortable habits of spinsterhood though tea is the signal to the reader that she has changed. She is heard to wonder whether of all things, she and the other women at the Bazaar Committee really need a cup of tea. It was the kind of question that starts a landslide of the mind -- she murmers to us in an aside. Furthermore, the vicar going even further, asks if they really need the meeting event.
The end of the novel finds Mildred and Everard Bone sharing a casserole at his apartment.
I should be interested to see the article you said you writing for the Learned Journal, I said.
Oh, it's very dull; I shan't inflict that on you.
Well what about your book, then? How is it getting on?
I have just had some of the proofs and then of course the index will have to be done. I don't know how I'm going to find time to do it, said Everard, not looking at me.
But aren't there people who do things like that?
You mean excellent women whom one respects and admires?
You can guess the ending here but let me say that there is a pleasant surprise about Mildred and Everard which comes to light in another of Pym's novels. Pym has a hard time letting go of her characters, as they will appear fleetingly in other novels. And who can blame her?
And so to all the excellent women at the blogs here - good night. It is now 4:25 a.m. and while I know the Mom Cat is up for instance and maybe others - I hope most of you are dreaming the dreams of excellent women. I may return to my kitchen and finish an argument with my companion about his mess on my dining room table and his propensity to stay up all night working on computers. He is an eccentric, so I put up with him - and vice versa. |
