Michelle Bailat-Jones

After discovering Barbara Pym earlier this year, I went on a mini Pym binge and read several of her books in quick succession – Excellent Women, No Fond Return of Love and Jane and Prudence. Then I jumped ahead and read her “come-back” novel, Quartet in Autumn, which is markedly different from those earlier books. In those earlier works, Pym is often laugh-out-loud funny. Although many of her characters are lonely, they are almost always able to take an ironic stance toward that loneliness, which lightens it – at least for the reader.

However, Quartet in Autumn, although it has some traces of humor, is a thoroughly serious book. I’d even go so far as to consider this short novel a quiet tragedy. Much of Pym’s usual preoccupations are present, including unmarried men and women and clerical life, but she isn’t teasing anyone with these ideas. The focus of her revelatory concern goes beyond these smaller social issues; she exposes the very nature of loneliness.

Quartet in Autumn is about four office colleagues – Marcia, Letty, Edwin and Norman – and their respective solitary lives. Much of what Pym describes is heartbreaking. Marcia storing up empty milk bottles and canned food, Letty listening to the radio alone in her room in the evening, an angry Norman watching young people play in a park at lunch, and Edwin’s cultivated obliviousness. These four individuals are horribly, horribly lonely, but so stuck in their mode of living that they are unwilling to do anything that might rumple the surface of that loneliness. Each time an offer comes about (and there are several throughout the book) that might somehow decrease someone’s isolation, it is always immediately rejected.

Pym has an incredible eye for character differentiation. With a less careful writer, these four people could all start to resemble one another because, at least on the surface, they really do all have a lot in common. But no, Marcia and Letty are so different they can hardly speak to one another and Edwin and Norman also sit on different ends of the “old bachelor” spectrum. Watching these four interact, first at the office and then later after Marcia and Letty have retired, is somewhat funny at its lightest, but quite painful at its worst.

I must say that one of the things I find curious about Pym is her complete and utter lack of sensuality. These four people are lonely, yes, but she doesn’t really push their loneliness outside of an intellectual representation. How do I put this? There is never much concern for the physical reality of being lonely. The issue of never being touched for a person who lives alone is mentioned once, via another character, a social worker who checks on Marcia actually, but Pym never allows her actual characters to express themselves through this filter. What is remarkable to me is that Pym is so effective at conveying the loneliness of her characters without really resorting to an investigation of their physical loneliness.

Although, having said that, one of the characters in this novel, Marcia, manifests her loneliness through anorexia, which could be considered a physical representation. Yet this is also about control, about denying the physical. So it’s almost an extreme version of what I just said above.

Quartet in Autumn has a typically Pym-like ambiguous and perhaps frustrating ending. A possible reprieve from loneliness is again on offer, but Pym doesn’t tell the reader whether it will come to anything.

I am not usually very interested in the life of a writer – I prefer to take the whole of their work and let that sit with me – but the trajectory of Pym’s writing career intrigues me, especially the forced 13 year hiatus she took because no one was interested in publishing her after she’d finished her sixth novel. She was resurrected apparently because two prominent male writers championed her work. I’m curious how she managed those 13 years – I know that she continued to write because what she wrote was eventually published. Her diaries are published as A Very Private Eye and there is a biography of her by Hazel Holt called A Lot to Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym.

Has anyone read either? Thoughts?

Having just finished my second Barbara Pym novel, No Fond Return of Love, I can safely say she is now a favorite. I will return happily to both No Fond Return of Love and Excellent Women for rereading at some point. They are easily the kind of book a person could grab off the shelf on a rainy afternoon and vanish inside the story for several wonderful hours.

No Fond Return of Love is similar to Excellent women in that it tells the story of a woman (I was going to say a young woman, because she can’t be much over thirty, but alas, she is not quite young enough and that fact lies quite firmly at the root of her troubles) who is recently disengaged from her fiancé and attends an academic conference in an attempt to forget her sorrow. At the conference, she meets two people who will greatly change the next few months of her life.

Now, I quite like books with this sort of premise, because it is exactly the people we meet under the most banal circumstances who can change our lives unexpectedly, in both good and bad ways. And Dulcie Mainwaring is greatly in need of change. Her first encounter is with another woman on the verge of inconsolable spinsterhood, Viola Dace, and then she is subsequently introduced to a very handsome academic named Dr. Aylwin Forbes. These three are thrown together over the course of the novel and Pym uses their various situations to look at her central question about the nature of happiness and how it relates to love and marriage.

On the whole, I would say that No Fond Return of Love is an easy novel. That word easy is so dangerous, I think, because it can also mean (and I have myself used it this way) to imply that the book lacks depth. This is where Pym’s strength lies. Her books appear quite light, really, and are wonderfully readable and funny. But there is an almost harrowing sorrow in all that she brings up. Her characters are laughable, but they are also suffering an acute pain.

Lilian Nattel and Litlove brought up Pym’s endings in the comments on Lilian’s post on Excellent Women. As Litlove put it, “For such a funny writer, though, she often chooses frustrating endings, or at least endings in which few people win or make headway.” This is so spot-on that I had to repeat it here. The ending of No Fond Return of Love leaves her characters at a kind of impasse, in a situation that would certainly not be considered advantageous for anyone, and yet…it feels very real. Pym deals with the notion of compromise quite openly, as if compromise is the only way to move forward in love relationships. This is quite depressing, but gets to the complicated reality that IS a relationship. This is also probably why Pym could never be considered a romantic novelist even when all of her books focus almost exclusively on marriage and love.

One last thing I wanted to mention about this particular book is the way Pym handles the narrative perspective. It is actually quite uncommon how she slips back and forth into each character’s mind, even within the same paragraph. The effect can be a little destabilizing until you get used to it, but after that it creates a really intricate mosaic. Having such direct access into the minds of all the characters makes the reader the only one who really understands all that is going on. This technique, combined with Pym’s incisive satirical voice, actually generates a lot of sympathy. Satire always risks turning a character into a stereotype, or, at the very least, into an object of scorn. But Pym sidesteps this so neatly, by bringing the reader as close as possible inside the character that what remains important is their fragility—in whatever form that takes.