posted on 28 Feb 2020

Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym

I think the last Barbara Pym novel I tried reading was the very one I have just reread – Quartet in Autumn. I first read it when it was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1977.

It was the first Barbara Pym novel for fourteen years. Prior to that she had published six quiet, restrained, very English novels – respected for their Austenesque qualities but selling, I suspect, in minute numbers – until suddenly being dropped by her publisher Jonathan Cape in 1963. Her melancholy middle-class world of vicarages and unrequited love, of lonely spinsters of a certain age, of disappointed lives and genteel poverty, had been judged irredeemably out of fashion. And predictably, when I first read Quartet I dismissed it similarly for just those reasons, not pausing to see what lay beneath its deceptively simple surface, and failing to register its wry humour. Not so this time. I found it both darkly funny and extremely moving.

Quartet in Autumn concerns four unrelated characters, two men, Edwin and Norman, and two women, Letty and Marcia, whose only connection is that they work together in an unnamed department of an unnamed office doing work of a relatively menial and not very meaningful nature. (This faceless and dispiriting setting may have been prompted by Pym’s own experience of working at the International African Institute at SOAS University, where she worked for many years.)

Edwin is widowed but all of the others are unmarried. Both women are very close to retirement and indeed do retire about half-way through the novel, the occasion marked by a lunchtime sherry and a quick speech from the department head, lunchtime having been settled on as more appropriate than an evening ‘do’ because the staff would have their sandwiches with them and there would therefore be no need for catering.

And relations between these four disparate characters – increasingly sad, even bleak, as we see the women trying to make a post-retirement life, Marcia declining rapidly following surgery for breast cancer – makes up the rest of the novel. (I won’t spoil the plot but will say that the ending – surprisingly – is really rather beautiful, happier than one might suppose and superbly executed.)

That may sound dull, but it isn’t. It’s funny, wry, sardonic, witty, mildly (sometimes obstinately) optimistic, and sometimes unapologetically pessimistic. You don’t need to read very much before you realise why Larkin was a fan: Pym inhabits a world remarkably close in texture and tone to Larkin’s. Pym and her characters seem simultaneously steeped in the past (in Quartet all of the characters were born on the cusp of or during the first world war, as was Pym herself – she was born in 1913) while also having an eye to the future: this is where we are heading, they all seem to say, this is the world we have inherited, we are voyaging into the unknown in a world that has outgrown us. This was very much the wellspring of Larkin’s art. I had never quite made this connection before.

Her novels are also emblematic of a more innocent time, and for many this is undoubtedly their attraction. It must also be said, of course, a more casually racist, more repressed, more class-conscious, more formal time. But what makes Quartet in Autumn such a pleasure is the slyly sophisticated way that Pym handles the changing England of the early 70s. Edwin, despite being grey and balding, is described as trying out a longer, almost bobbed hairstyle (‘even older gentleman are wearing it longer now’, his barber had told him) – and anyone who was a teenager or twenty-something in the 1970s will know exactly what that particular style looked like. At one point the office foursome go for an ill-advised weekday lunch, having promised that they must ‘meet up’ after the women retire, without really having any intention of doing so. The café they choose has been violently redecorated with wallpaper and curtains of bold geometric design in burnt orange and olive. Again, instantly recognisable to readers of a certain age.

However, if you are offended by seeing the attitudes of a past age reflected in the literature of that period, then Barbara Pym may be best avoided. This was probably what her publisher was thinking when it dropped her in 1963. But it turns out that the small anxieties and hopes that Pym documented, the trivialities of everyday life, the melancholy weight of loneliness and the small triumphs of loneliness temporarily overcome, are in fact as ageless as the inner landscapes of Larkin’s poems, and as enduring. But rather unlike Larkin, in Pym’s writing, even at its bleakest, there is always a bubbling undertow of stoic humour. Not ‘comic writing’, mark you: there are no jokes as such and nothing ‘funny’ happens – the humour is all in her authorial asides, her impeccable dialogue, her acute observation and her characters’ interior monologues. It is humour of a kind that is indivisible from the very texture of the novel – woven in, as it were.

From this 1977 novel that seems to perfectly capture Pym’s late, melancholy style I moved on to what many regard as her early masterpiece, Excellent Women, published twenty-five years earlier in 1952 but set I think in 1948/49. This is a full immersion in Pym’s small and gently ironic world of genteel scraping-by, the festivals of the church calendar, spinsterhood, loneliness (and what I suppose we would today call low self-esteem) and a post-war, rationing London that still seems village-like, in some respects an outpost of the rural parsonages from which her central characters typically come.

In this case the ironic title refers to the always underestimated but utterly indispensable ‘excellent women’ whose voluntary work keeps the local churches and their clergy just about above water. There is a genuinely sparkling Austenish wit to this novel – it is an altogether brighter comedy of manners and hugely enjoyable.

Pym’s work has drifted in and out of fashion over the years and seems destined to continue to do so. But thankfully, her novels of the 50s and 60s, the three further novels published during her lifetime, and the four posthumously published novels of the 1980s (all written much earlier when she had no publisher) are currently all in print in paperback. Once written off as being small, parochial and unexciting, her novels now come with an additional weight of social history that makes the best of them greatly more significant than was once thought. At last finding the pleasures that many others have found in Barbara Pym feels like discovering an unexplored, unrecognised seam of treasure.

 

Alun Severn

February 2020