Happy New Year of Reading Dead Writers!
Let us begin with my favorite Barbara Pym novel, No Fond Return of Love. I adore this book, set on the fringes of the literary professions in London in the late ’50s or early ’60s. In a pulp paperback edition, the blurb on the cover would say INDEXERS IN LOVE!, perched above an illustration of two buxom women gawking at a handsome man.
But this is not the real story, of course. Pym did not write romance novels; she did not even write romantic comedies. Her quirky comedies are gently satiric. Her heroines wear sensible shoes.
Pym’s wry sense of humor about the nature of love highlights the heroines’ whimsical quotations of poetry. No one is very young; no one falls desperately in love. Love is a relationship based on sex, common interests, and often convenience. In reality, the two indexers, Dulcie Mainwaring and Viola Dace, are not romantic: they are lonely women who meet at a conference for editors, indexers, and proofreaders. Dulcie attends to meet new people and recover from her broken engagement to a younger man, Maurice. Viola, a black-clad bohemian, takes one look at Dulcie’s sensible shoes and knows it was a mistake to attend.
But was it a mistake? As at all academic conferences, people devote much time to socializing. And the stunningly handsome, middle-aged editor, Aylwin Forbes, is an object of attraction. Viola attended purposely to be near him after hearing that his wife left him. And Dulcie becomes mildly interested after Alwyn faints at the podium and she sensibly applies smelling salts to revive him.
Viola and Dulcie run into each other in London and bond over Aylwin. Dulcie is not seriously interested, but she does idle “research “on Alywin at the Public Records office, the public library, and perhaps the British Museum in her free time. She and Viola walk in Aylwin’s neighborhood at night, because his house is near Viola’s bed-sit, and when they run into him, all three are embarrassed. But that is not all: they also attend Alywin’s brother Neville’s church. There is, unfortunately, a substitute clergyman: Neville has gone home to Mother for Easter because, most inconveniently, Miss Spicer has fallen in love with him. He has problems with women in every parish. The two brothers are too good-looking.
Dulcie’s whimsy and insatiable research are hilarious. She and Viola invite her former fiance, Maurice, her neighbors, and Aylwin to a dinner party, and she and Viola manage to be charming. But Aylwin is interested in neither Dulcie nor Viola. He prefers Dulcie’s 18-year-old niece, Laurel, though he is almost fifty.
At the end, allusions to Mansfield Park charmingly sum up the not-quite love story. It ends most satisfactorily, though not quite as one would expect. Pym, in my opinion, mockingly tweaks the marriage plot, though there is usually at least one marriage in her novels, and the couples seems happy enough. Dulcie spends a lot of time making marmalade and doing other domestic tasks. She would welcome love, but does not actively pursue it, despite appearances. Whether there is any fond return of love is not entirely clear
And that’s the inimitable Barbara Pym.
Very good. You have caught some of Pym’s essential qualities and attitudes found across her novels – the few
I’ve read thus far and her diary. Still there is something uncomfortable in this particular book — of these middle-aged or older women chasing these two men and the man preferring younger women merely because they are physically younger. I hope that Pym is not merely amused by this but troubled or disquieted.
I love Pym’s work, and her portraits of women on the brink of “spinsterhood.” Of course, she also writes disturbingly about four aging office workers and what happens during their retirement. This one is a gentle comeedy. And Dulcie does rebuke Aylwin when he says he wants to marry her niece! But Laurel can take care of herself: she laughs at him. “He is older than Daddy!”