Small Hopes and PLeasures

I find myself at the end of a Barbara Pym reading binge--and in the midst of A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters. Pym is often compared to Jane Austen, writing as she does about ordinary people with ordinary lives. I find her writing comforting, in these turbulent times and return to it now and again.

Pym's diaries and letters reveal so much about her--the years at Oxford and her unhappy penchant for falling in love and hanging on, even when it was clear the object of her love was no longer interested in her.

But it was her writing during WWII that struck a chord with me. 

"Who knows what the war will bring though? Already to think is to be full of sorrow, but I am never without hope. The winter has never seemed so long or so cold as this year and I am sure I never had chilblains before. And now that I have come down to the ridiculous I can tell you that most of my hopes are very small ones and my pleasures too. Getting letters, finishing my blue tweed jacket, watching my bulbs sprout and flower (that's not so small), imagining that one day I shall see my friends again. I suppose everyone lives from day to day now and it really is the best way if you cannot see anything pleasant in the future." 

I had a friend to lunch last week, and we drank (a little) wine and talked about books. She emailed me later that it felt HUMAN to chat over coffee and talk about books. 

Indeed it did. I think Miss Pym would have approved. And may we all get through these troubled times, just as she did WWII.

 

A Most Proper Orgy

I'm not sure when I began to read Barbara Pym -- over thirty years ago, I think, when, after a long period of obscurity, she was re-discovered by the literary world, short-listed for the Booker Prize, her early books were re-issued, and some new books came out. 

 And having discovered her myself, I wasn't quite sure what to make of these exceedingly quiet and quietly witty English novels. But over the years I kept returning to Pym's world of unmarried girls, middle-aged spinsters, curates, married vicars, anthropologists and academics, always finding myself drawn to the minutely pictured and well lived lives therein.

It took a while for me to realize that what I was reading were comedies of manners, written by a modern-day Jane Austen.  Not a lot happens -- sometimes two people find each other; sometimes they don't. But it's a pleasant, cosy world in which to spend a little time.

Recently I completed  my Pym collection (one book not pictured, A GLASS OF BLESSINGS, is on my Kindle) and had the pleasure of reading a few I'd never read, including several works that were published after her death.  

And I capped off my Pym orgy of reading with A VERY PRIVATE EYE -- one of the most intensely personal autobiographies imaginable.  It was published after her death and consists of her diaries and letters from her undergraduate years at Oxford, throughout the early years when her first novels were published, her service with the WRENS in WWII, the agonizing fifteen year period when publishers decided her work was too old-fashioned, the wonderful turn her career took after the poet Philip Larkin championed her work,  and all the way to her final days.

 It's interesting to read these extremely frank and unguarded accounts of Pym's life and recognize how she made use of her experiences. Indeed, in her diaries she is always jotting down ideas and observations which show up in her work. As a reader and as a writer, I was completely fascinated. 

And I can't help thinking how wonderful it would be to have a similar companion to Jane Austen's work . . .