The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Excellent Women

  • Where the Parish Magazine Becomes a Classic

    Finishing Barbara Pym’s “Excellent Women,” read aloud evenings recently with Susan, wondering in an aside what we’ll read next, as Pym’s first person narrator, Mildred Lathbury, says this:

    “I had finished my library book, and thought how odd it was that although I had the great novelists and poets well represented on my shelves, none of their works seemed to attract me” (195).

    Reading, at the time, just after World War II, in London, where food and shelter shortages continued, was a main source of resourcefulness for solving the difficulties of one’s free but empty time. But why Mildred’s pause in interest in the classics? What is she wanting to read?

    “It would be a good opportunity to read some of the things I was always meaning to read, like In Memoriam or The Brothers Karamazov, but in the end I was reduced to reading the serial in the parish magazine” (195).

    What follows is Mildred’s summary of that serial entry, which sounds very much like something from the book we have in hand by Barbara Pym, “Excellent Women.” Saying she was “reduced” is characteristically Mildred, too hard on herself, always questioning her own motives and chastising herself whenever she feels she’s been impolite, unkind, or unfair, or otherwise failing some obscure or fancied expectation that no one else would give a first thought to, let alone a second.

    “The caption under the picture said, ‘I’m sure Mrs. Goodrich didn’t mean to hurt your feelings about the jumble sale.’ I finished the episode with a feeling of dissatisfaction. There was some just cause or impediment which prevented the clergyman from marrying the girl, some mysterious reason why Mrs. Goodrich should have snubbed her at the jumble sale, but we should have to wait until next month before we could know any more about it” (195).

    The whole passage quoted in parts above can be read as Barbara Pym’s explanation or description of the type of writing she herself is attempting, or to include, but without setting the reader up for, in the end, a “dissatisfaction,” even if we have to wait for subsequent chapters to discover some “mysterious reason” behind things said or acted out. In as much as she might be seen to turn away from “the great novelists” (whoever they might have included, apart from Dostoevsky, in post war Europe, or in Mildred’s entering her 30s in late 1940s estimation), Barbara Pym actually engages many of their lofty themes, which turn out to be easily accessible to what the lowest of characters is capable of transmitting. The passage is a literary critical comment of her own writing, which is not “classic,” but an extension to the church newsletter, weekly bulletin, full of jumble sales and bazaar conversations about relationships, motivations, disassembling.

    Humor and grace, alongside satire and wit and subtlety, abound in Pym’s work. So too in Penelope Fitzgerald’s, and I think our next book for reading aloud will be Penelope’s great “Offshore” (1979), which takes place around 1961, also in London, a decade after the setting of “Excellent Women.” Though Penelope was much older when she wrote “Offshore” (or any of her other novels) than Barbara Pym was when she wrote “Excellent Women,” she might well have been a character in a Barbara Pym novel. These are domestic novels, but unsentimental, and to qualify as such, the writing must be suited to being read aloud, and not overly dense. “Excellent Women” was some kind of fun reading aloud. We’ll see how “Offshore” goes.

  • Waiting for a Cold Spell

    I’ve been reading aloud evenings to Susan, “Excellent Women,” by Penelope Pym. First published in 1952, the setting is London after the war. Soldiers are coming home, rentals are hard to find, some foods are still being rationed. The narrator is the understated, astute Mildred Lathbury, a bit over 30, who has a flat of her own, but must share a bathroom with the lodgers downstairs. She attends church regularly, helps with the jumble sales and flowers for the altar, and is drawn into relationships involving a cast of characters requiring her free and easy to come by assistance. Every character’s name seems effectively thought out. Not my favorite character, but certainly my favorite name, is Everard Bone, an anthropologist:

    “I crept quietly up to my flat and began to prepare supper. The house seemed to be empty. Saturday night . . . perhaps it was right that it should be and I sitting alone eating a very small chop. After I had washed up I would listen to Saturday Night Theatre and do my knitting. I wondered where the Napiers were, if they were out together, or if Helena was with Everard Bone” (57).

    It’s my third time reading “Excellent Women,” but just the first time reading it aloud. A few nights ago, a chapter began with this:

    “A list of furniture is not a good beginning to a letter, though I dare say a clever person with a fantastic turn of mind could transform even a laundry list into a poem.

    I sat for a long time at my desk, unable to put pen to paper, idly turning the pages of a notebook in which I kept accounts and made shopping lists. How fascinating they would have been, had they been mediaeval shopping lists! I thought. But perhaps there was matter for poetry in them, with their many uncertainties and question marks” (164).

    And I have been sitting this morning at my writing table wondering if I have time for some writing that might make for a good post for this here Hear ye blog. The electric folks are on the block this week replacing utility poles, and we’ve been told they will shut our power off for most of the day today, likely around 8 to 3, though it’s now 9 and the coffee is still hot and the temperature inside stable. The big inconvenience, once the power goes off, comes from it being only around 40 degrees out, and our old place does not hold heat any longer than a tee shirt and swim trunks in a dunk at Refugio.

    A few weeks ago, I bought a digital subscription to the New York Times for $4.00 a month. Little did I know at the time that I would spend as much time on their Games page as on their news. Like most things pocket phone related, the games are addictive. My favorite is Spelling Bee. Every day, a new circle of 7 letters is posted for you to type as many words over 3 letters long as you can find – all using the center letter. Today’s letters amount to a difficult episode: b c d y t e o. So far, I’ve found only 8 words: Body, Booty, Byte, Dotty, Eddy, Teddy, Toddy, and Toyed. My score at this point is “Nice,” the rankings ranging from Beginner to Good Start, Moving Up, Good, Solid, Nice, Great, Amazing, and Genius. A four letter word is worth only 1 point, longer words worth more, a pangram scores high. The longest word I’ve logged so far is Ineffective. Statistics are maintained in the game file. I’ve worked 35 puzzles, finding 755 words, including 16 pangrams, but only 4 times have I scored Genius.

    I doubt Barbara Pym succumbing to digital games, but maybe Mildred Lathbury would play along. Here’s a short poem I made using the words from the Spelling Bee mentioned above:

    Waiting for a Cold Spell
    Teddy swimming in the spilling morning waves 
    Dotty over having this morning scored Amazing 
    In the New York Times oft Toyed Toddy in hand 
    Testing word Bytes but Eddy and Bill stay away 
    For the Booty is holy Body alone and cold here
    Unlike marbles in a warm dust of green Spring.

    “Excellent Women,” by Barbara Pym, was first published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1952, in the US by E. P. Dutton in 1978, and my edition by Penguin Books in 2006.