Diary: Travel Reading with Sarah Ruden, Barbara Pym

In December of 2022, my husband and I came down with covid during a visit to Ireland and quarantined in a Killarney hotel for several days. I slept, choked on phlegm, and wondered whether I would ever be able to taste food again. But I had done some inspired packing: five Barbara Pym novels from mid-twentieth-century England. I had read a couple of them years before, but now I gulped all these with a pleasure that, it turned out, was not just circumstantial. During the next year I read them and Pym’s eight other novels so many times that I began to hold them in reserve the way I do Jane Austen (to whom Pym is often compared), out of paranoia that my delight would run out someday.

Freud noted that paranoiacs are hard to treat, because there’s always some truth to it. I remain leery of both authors failing me, because both do present a sort of perpetual motion machine: there is too little input in proportion to the output; the first law of thermodynamics seems to be violated. Both Austen and Pym thrived on little outward stimulation over most of their writing lives, and their protagonists get even less. Austen’s richest and most indulged heroine, Emma, complains playfully of never having seen the sea, a one- or two-day journey from her home in a fictional Surrey town. Fanny in Mansfield Park barely ever leaves the park until she is sent home to much greater confinement in her parents’ tawdry house. Throughout the Austen novels, pleasures flash intensely and prevail in the heart as if by miracles of sensitivity in these quiet, dim, and rain-blown lives. The young women cherish a walk, a dance, music, a few books—but above all a man with the “delicacy” to balance the female experience against his own in an actual conversation.

In Pym’s novels there is the same stress on pleasure, but here most of the women cannot steady a foot on the lowest rung, and they hardly dare look up at the possibility of stimulating friendships, interesting occupations, and happy marriages. They frequent bleak post-World War II eateries during lunch breaks from jobs too meaningless to merit, in themselves, more than a couple of sentences in the story. In Quartet in Autumn, two men and two women work in an unspecified capacity in an office with an unspecified purpose. At the retirement party for the women, the (acting) deputy assistant director crafts praise out of the general ignorance of what they did in a department now being phased out. In Crampton Hodnet, a wealthy spinster’s paid companion finally buys a blue velvet dress for a wedding but shrinks from wearing it again for fear of snide comments from her employer, who thought it extravagant in the first place. In An Unsuitable Attachment, a woman on a dutiful visit of remembrance is too refined to stop her working-class host from diving into her basket and claiming all the precious contents as Christmas presents for herself. Several of the protagonists are university-educated, with a taste for lyric poetry from exuberant eras, but this literature appears in a sort of sad rationing. One line or couplet or stanza illustrates a servile, enduring passion for some consummate jerk.

This is because a particularly poignant austerity is the shortage of men. They are stoically, politely shared, and energetically spoiled; it would be like complaining about common and unavoidable privations to protest at their just-business fickleness, their what-else narcissism and exploitation, their stomach-turning condescension, or any other failure to treat women as human beings.

How does Pym make stories about pointless hopes, game disappointments, and dull resolutions so absorbing? Why is she not merely depressing, given that her likable characters appear as if at the bottom of a funnel of women’s literary history (Austen being the expansive top), where so little emotional room is left that even happy-ending marriages receive quite reserved coverage, careful qualification if they already exist, cool speculation if they are about to? It is not overt wit that allows Pym to pull so much off, though she does have moments. (My favorite: an academic couple in Less Than Angels have gathered information on an African tribe’s marriage practices in exchange for generous disclosures about their own, “which filled the natives with delight and astonishment.”) As in Austen, there is no satire harsh enough to put the reader, with a rush of heady contempt, at arm’s length from events: involvement reigns, and a sympathy largely free of Schadenfreude.

My guess is that the humanism of survival and small satisfactions is important here. Pym never married (though she put out with energy when she was young), and had a long, ill-used, underpaid career as assistant editor for the academic journal Africa. Diversions in her maturity included local church services and committee work. But she did not languish in boredom; she was so fascinated by mere people that she might shadow and research strangers until she could construct whole lives for them in her head. She could imply the workings of an entire household from a bunch of flowers or a chocolate biscuit. She never let go of the war’s being over, and tea and evensong still there. Perhaps that is as happy, and exciting, an ending as one can hope for at this point in history too.

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Sarah Ruden’s most recent book is Vergil: The Poet’s Life. She has also translated many classical Greek and Roman works as well as The Gospels: A New Translation.

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