Behaving Badly – and Barbara Pym

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Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Behaving Badly, Catherine Heath, Green Leaves, Judi Dench, St Hilda's College Oxford

‘I could hardly make a big production of it, you know… when he told me, about how he’d spent the night with some girl called Rebecca, all I could think of was the fact that I’d bought turbot for supper…’

Catherine Heath’s fifth and final novel Behaving Badly gives us one of the most brilliantly-conceived comic heroines ever. Published in 1984, it is somehow perfect escapist reading for today, taking us to a past which feels in retrospect to have been more innocent and less complicated.

‘I was going to do Hollandaise sauce, and I thought, oh dear, our lovely dinner’s going to be quite wasted. So when he told me about this girl I just said, oh, yes, I see. Oh, thank you for telling me. And that was all and we ate the turbot and do you know I quite enjoyed it… So I mean, there’s no point in putting on a tragic act. It stands to reason that nobody, nobody that greedy has much dignity to stand on.’

Fifty-year-old Bridget Mayor has dutifully filled her life with hobbies, television and church-going after her husband dumped her five years earlier to marry a much younger woman. Nothing very unusual about that for women in seventies Britain. But what happens when an Excellent Woman stops being excellent and decides she will start pleasing herself instead of other people? What’s the point in clinging to dignity? To her husband’s horrified discomfiture Bridget insists on moving back into her old home in Hampstead, where her devious ex-mother-in-law Frieda conspires to get rid of the intruder Rebecca. But that’s just the start…

Writing in The Times, Isabel Raphael wrote of Behaving Badly: Here is an exceptional novel, brisk and unsentimental, touching and subtly romantic. It is also very funny. Her style is poised and cool and her dialogue as artfully artless as that of Barbara Pym; and there is no higher praise in novels of this kind.

There are connections between the two novelists Barbara Pym (1913-1980) and Catherine Heath (1924-1991): both studied English Literature at St Hilda’s College Oxford, both seamlessly combine wit, satire and sympathy, and both died of cancer aged sixty-six. But it’s disappointing that Catherine Heath remains relatively unknown. In the Barbara Pym Society’s publication Green Leaves of November 1998 Hazel K. Bell wrote how she hoped that Catherine Heath’s wonderful novels would one day be rescued from obscurity, in the same way as Barbara Pym’s have been.

That hasn’t happened, despite Judi Dench’s superb performance as Bridget in the 1989 British television series of Behaving Badly, now available as a DVD. If only they would show it again!

Behaving Badly clearly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It will seem too dated for some, too much a piece of social history, even too trivial. But for others it’s an altogether delightful read where favourite lines can be relished over and over again: Upstairs Frieda closed a detective story. It was useless. She had no access to South American arrow poison. And as one character says near the end, using a very Barbara Pymish word, ‘Isn’t it, in a way, splendid?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oxford delights: Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym

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19 magazine, Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Georgette Heyer, Harriet, Jane and Prudence, Jane Austen, Jilly Cooper, Lisa & Co, Nancy Mitford, Oxford, Petticoat magazine, Virago

What’s the connection between Jilly Cooper and Barbara Pym apart from them being quintessentially English and writing splendidly funny novels?

Jilly Cooper’s introduction to the 2007 Virago edition of Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence, first published in 1953, tells the story of how she borrowed the novel quite by chance from a library and fell in love with it. ‘I shamefully lied to the librarians that I had lost it, paying a 3s 6d fine … over the years, as Barbara Pym replaced Nancy Mitford, Georgette Heyer, even Jane Austen, as my most loved author, I devoured all her books, but Jane and Prudence remains my favourite.’

Jilly Cooper was therefore the perfect and altogether delightful guest at a magnificent tea in Oxford, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbara Pym Society, as part of the Society’s weekend conference featuring Jane and Prudence.  Some of those attending might never have read a Jilly Cooper novel; others like myself have delicious youthful memories of revelling in her stories serialised in magazines like 19 and Petticoat, some of which were subsequently expanded into short romantic novels named after their heroines.

It’s in Harriet, partly set in Oxford and published in 1976, that we get a rather endearing echo of a scene in Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence; in both novels young girls remark to each other that thirty sounds so old but forty must be worse… whereupon they brood silently upon this horror!

Jilly Cooper might be more famous now for her ‘bonkbuster’ novels, starting with Riders in 1985, but perhaps the older among us will always have an affectionate soft spot for the irresistible heroes and scatty/naughty/dreamy/kind-hearted/unselfconfident/innocent heroines of the early romantic novels Bella, Emily, Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, Imogen and her collection of short stories Lisa & Co, first published as Love and Other Heartaches. They offered the escapist, romantic, comfort-with-comedy reading we sometimes needed when growing up.

As Jilly Cooper wrote of her short stories in 1981 ‘I cannot pretend that these stories are literature. They are written purely to entertain… Their mood is rooted firmly in the sixties, where we all lived it up… when the young were still optimistic about marriage, and believed that God was in his Heaven if all was Mr Right with the world.’

Jilly Cooper met Barbara Pym just once – at the Hatchards Authors of the Year Party in 1979 – a wonderful memory she will always treasure. I know I will do the same after meeting Jilly Cooper.

Anglican Women Novelists

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Agatha Christie, Alison Shell, Barbara Pym, Book of Common Prayer, Capital punishment, Charlotte Bronte, Charlotte M Yonge, Charlotte Maria Tucker, Church of England, Dorothy L Sayers, East Anglia, Elizabeth Goudge, Evelyn Underhill, Gaudy Night, Iris Murdoch, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Judith Maltby, Lambeth Palace Library, Margaret Oliphant, Monica Furlong, Murder Must Advertise, Noel Streatfeild, P D James, Prayer Book Society, Rose Macaulay, Shirley, The Nine Tailors, Unnatural Death

There have been more Anglican women novelists than you might think. 13 of them feature in Anglican Women Novelists – from Charlotte Brontë to PD James, edited by Judith Maltby and Alison Shell, and published only this year. Two of the ninevoices were at its launch in the magnificent setting of Lambeth Palace Library in July.

The editors explain that to keep the book of manageable size they restricted it to writers who were British and deceased. But questions of selection are inevitable. Iris Murdoch is here? Yes, because although she lost her faith in Christ’s divinity, and was drawn towards Buddhism, her world was still infused by Anglicanism and she still attended Anglican services. The author of the Iris Murdoch essay (Peter S Hawkins) entitles it “Anglican Atheist”.

And why no Jane Austen, in whose novels the C of E features so much, when Charlotte Brontë gets in? Because between the two lie Catholic Emancipation and the repeals of the Test and Corporation Acts, meaning that other denominations could now take their place freely on the national stage: Anglicanism had lost its ‘default’ position as the nation’s faith and was becoming more of a denomination that you made a positive choice to join.

The essay on Charlotte Brontë (by Sara L Pearson) argues how much her life was rooted in the C of E and how much of her work does too. Shirley, we read, shows her “longing for the Church of England’s preservation and reformation”. In Jane Eyre the male representatives of the Church, Mr Brocklehurst and St John Rivers, are hardly role models, and their failings are compared with (and perhaps compensated for by) the qualities of female characters around them. Also, “the Book of Common Prayer haunts the pages of Jane Eyre … not only for its contents but also as a physical object”: it will have formed such an ever-present part of her childhood.

‘Dorothy L Sayers – God and the Detective’ is the title of Jessica Martin’s piece. She speaks of the role justice and punishment play in her detective novels. She makes the important point that Golden Age detective novels were written in the time when the hangman awaited the unmasked murderer: in that sense the stakes were higher, the ultimate retribution is always in the background.   Sayers had trouble with this, we read: she had “increasing unease with narrative arcs which must privilege orderly acts of justice over the wilder power of mercy”. She sees the limitations of this, and justice must come from elsewhere: “her plots have an invisible protagonist, and his name is Jehovah”. The essay then analyses Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, Unnatural Death and Gaudy Night in this light.

The final essay is ‘PD James – “Lighten our Darkness”’ by Alison Shell.   She compares PD James to other Golden Age detective writers, principally Agatha Christie, concluding, “For all her own homage to Christie, her novels are far more violent and desolate than her predecessor’s; if Christie is the quintessential Golden Age detective novelist, James’ fallen world locates her within an Iron Age of crime fiction.” Evil is a reality: and the essay speculates on the degree to which PD James saw evil as a force in its own right. Her novels are steeped in the Anglican Church and its tradition. Churches (in a bleak East Anglia) provide the settings for many key events. PD James herself was a lover of the beauty of its traditional language and was a great supporter of the Prayer Book Society, set up to keep alive the glorious heritage of the Book of Common Prayer. Quotations from it recur in her work.

The other authors covered in the book are Charlotte Maria Tucker, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte M Yonge, Evelyn Underhill, Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Goudge, Noel Streatfeild and Monica Furlong.

Published by t&tclark, ISBN 978-0-567-68676-3 RRP £27-99

 

 

 

‘A Perfect Book’ – John Betjeman and Excellent Women

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Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society, Carolyn Pickles, Excellent Women, Frances Grey, Georgia Powell, Jane Slavin, John Betjeman, Malcolm Sinclair, Martin Hutson, Penelope Wilton, St Alban's Centre, Tristram Powell

For John Betjeman, Barbara Pym’s novel Excellent Women was ‘a perfect book’. Nobody listening to a splendid adaptation of it at the Barbara Pym Society Spring meeting in London would disagree. Probably some of the audience had read it so many times they practically knew every delicious line.

But what came across forcibly was that the novel, as adapted here by Georgia Powell and directed by Tristram Powell, worked so brilliantly in the format of a radio play. Large chunks and several characters were cut out but it was still perfect. This must be because the book is really written as a series of delightfully observed scenes; we are not waiting impatiently to see what happens next but savouring the fullness of every moment.

Each character in a Barbara Pym novel has a distinctive way of speaking; what they say could not possibly be spoken by anyone else. Another writing lesson here, I found myself thinking. I happily shut my eyes and listened to the actors playing the characters who are always living in the heads of Barbara Pym devotees, some of them taking on multiple parts – Frances Grey, Malcolm Sinclair, Martin Hutson, Jane Slavin, Carolyn Pickles – and Penelope Wilton as the narrator capturing the sly comedy of Barbara Pym’s voice.

Excellent Women was published in 1952, twenty years after John Betjeman’s first radio programme. If he’d been sitting with us in the St Alban’s Centre on Sunday he too would have revelled in this adaptation of the book he described as perfect. As he wrote, ‘Excellent Women is England, and, thank goodness, it is full of them.’

Barbara Pym – more please

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Barbara Pym, Finding a Voice, Short stories

In a radio talk recorded in February 1978 and transmitted on BBC Radio 3 in April, less than two years before she died, Barbara Pym described a favourite television quiz game, where panellists were asked to guess the authorship of certain passages read out to them. ‘There were no prizes for guessing, no moving belt or desirable objects passing before their eyes, just the pleasure and satisfaction of recognising the unmistakable voice of …  whoever it might be. I think that’s the kind of immortality most authors would want – to feel that their work would be immediately recognisable as having been written by them and by nobody else. But of course it’s a lot to ask for!’

It might be, but Barbara Pym’s voice is entirely and delightfully unmistakable; it’s unlike any other author, however longingly we search. There just isn’t enough of it for us readers – if only she’d written more! Blame her publishers who rejected her seventh novel An Unsuitable Attachment in 1963. Thank goodness she went on writing during the following fourteen years of rejection – though probably not as much as she might have done…

One of the joys of Barbara Pym’s novels is the way characters reappear. They are our old friends… Here in WRITINGS is a short story written as a light-hearted tribute to Barbara Pym featuring some of them:  Tread Softly in the Ladies.

 

 

 

Under attack – when it hurts

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Barbara Pym, Crampton Hodnet

Anyone who has ever given or lent a copy of a much-loved novel to a friend is likely to be familiar with the occasional disappointing response. It might include the suggestive silence, or the apologetic, half-embarrassed ‘sorry, not my kind of thing’ or even (and this is worse!)  ‘I can see why you enjoyed it, but…’

It may still surprise and even disconcert when the people we love don’t ‘get’ an author who means so much to us, but we’ve learnt not to allow this unaccountable gap to mar our friendship. It doesn’t change what we feel about them.

But comedians Kathy Burke and Tom Allen savaging Barbara Pym as ‘twee’ and ‘boring’ in a Radio 4 discussion of the novel Crampton Hodnet provoked bewilderment among Barbara Pym readers. How was it possible that these two critics had entirely missed the point of her novels?

One comment among the extensive online discussion which especially resonated was that criticism of Barbara Pym feels personal to him in a way that it doesn’t with other authors. But why should we mind when Barbara Pym is dismissed or mocked when we can shrug off adverse criticism of other authors we enjoy?  Perhaps it is because Barbara Pym writes so tellingly (and with a sharp wit that is always funny but somehow never cruel) about ordinary people, dealing with the small things of life which are also the big things.  Twee and boring seem to be the wrong words for such richness.

But it’s more than that. When Barbara Pym’s characters make reappearances in her later novels, it’s like being given news of old and dear friends. They have an extraordinary habit of living alongside us; in wilder moments we may even feel we are becoming one of them. No wonder an attack can hurt…

 

 

The most delightful competition ever

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Barbara Pym, Barbara Pym Society North American Conference

If you are a fan of Barbara Pym and looking for the perfect short story competition to enter, the Barbara Pym Society’s 2018 Ellen J Miller Memorial competition could be made for you.

What could be more blissful than the brief which is that entries must prominently feature one or more characters from Barbara Pym’s published novels, in any setting or situation the author chooses? Readers of Barbara Pym know how her characters continue to live beside them, in moments of recognition, both painful and comic, while offering endlessly comforting human solidarity …

The prize for the winning entry is $250 and the story will be read at the Society’s annual North American Conference held in Boston March 2018. The deadline is 4 December. Details at http://www.barbara-pym.org/

 

 

Reading aloud – pain and pleasure

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Barbara Pym, Eileen Atkins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Georgette Heyer, Ian Holm, Jane Austen, John Westbrook, Juliet Stevenson, Prunella Scales

Reading our own work aloud to ourselves is one of the pieces of advice handed out by creative writing tutors. At the proof-reading stage it’s an efficient way of picking up errors because it slows us down and reveals the camouflaged nasties that get missed by the skimming eye. It’s also effective for spotting all those other faults to which we can remain curiously blind – an awkwardly constructed sentence, ungraceful rhythm, accidental rhymes.

But when we read our novel aloud to other people, say in a writing group, we will inevitably include our own choice of intonation and expression to convey what we intend future readers to experience for themselves, what we as authors hear clearly in our own head. But future readers won’t have this add-on. Our written words must do all the work. Which is why it might be a very good idea to get another member to read for us. For only then will we be made aware of possible ambiguities of meaning, unconvincing dialogue, slips in point of view, confusion over who is speaking …

More work, there always is, but it could be sustained by a pleasant daydream about who we might choose should our novel ever be turned into an audiobook …  Unsurprisingly my own wishlist would include Juliet Stevenson and Eileen Atkins (marvellous at Barbara Pym novels and everything else too) and Prunella Scales (I can’t imagine another voice who so perfectly captures the wit and spirit of favourites like Jane Austen’s Emma and Elizabeth Gaskell’s  Wives and Daughters.

And then recent listening reminds me of Ian Holm’s wonderful reading of The Woman in White and for ultimate comfort when feeling tired or ill, John Westbrook provides the perfect restorative with Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy …

Listening to a good novel read aloud by someone in perfect sympathy with the text: one of life’s greatest delights. Does anybody have any recommendations?

 

 

Anglicanism and Women Novelists: A Special Relationship

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Barbara Pym, crime fiction, P D James

 

The lecture at the 2017 May meeting of the Barbara Pym Society  in London looks like being a good one for anyone interested in the relationship between Anglicanism, women novelists and detective fiction. It’s being given by Alison Shell, a professor in the English department at University College London. She is currently co-editing Anglican Women Novelists (Bloomsbury 2018) to which she will be contributing an essay on P D James – Baroness James was an honorary  life member of the Society and a great admirer of Barbara Pym’s books.

The Barbara Pym Society website is http://www.barbara-pym.org

Barbara Pym and Jane Austen

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Alexander McCall Smith, Barbara Pym, Jane Austen, Philip Larkin, Salley Vickers, Virago Modern Classics

Jane Austen is even more revered in America than in the UK – if that is possible. The same might be said of Barbara Pym whom Alexander McCall Smith described as ‘a modern Jane Austen’. Both authors have distinctive instantly recognisable voices; prose which can be savoured over and over again.

Salley Vickers in her introduction to the Virago Modern Classics edition of Barbara Pym’s Less Than Angels explains the points of resemblance between the novels of the two authors as being ‘similarly restrained in tone, with that glimmering undersheen of English irony’. It is this perhaps that appeals so much to Americans.

At a recent meeting of the Barbara Pym society in London where members heard an altogether delightful lecture about servants and home help of all kinds in her novels it was noticeable that it was the Americans in the audience who asked the more rigorous questions. Barbara Pym’s work is included alongside Jane Austen in English literature degree syllabuses at American universities.

So-called quiet novels are liable to last longest in the collective consciousness, argues Salley Vickers, and that ‘nothing in Jane Austen’s lifetime compares with her current popularity; her tombstone in Winchester Cathedral makes no mention of her career as a writer.’

A connection between the two novelists that is particularly appealing is when Barbara Pym wrote to Philip Larkin: ‘Here I am sixty-one (it looks worse spelled out in words) and only six novels published – no husband, no children.’ He wrote back: ‘Didn’t Jane Austen write six novels and not have a husband or children?’