"A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Letters and Diaries" by Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym - book review

As the subtitle suggests, this is an autobiography of Barbara Pym made up of her diaries, letters, and notebooks. I wanted to read this first, before Paula Byrne's biography, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, so that I could form my own opinions from the primary sources. The diaries cover most of Pym's early life from being an Oxford undergraduate through to the end of the Second World War. These are interspersed with letters to her Oxford friends. After the war, there are bigger gaps in the diary. Pym then starts keeping writer's notebooks to mark significant days and capture conversations and scenes, which she uses in her novels.

The editors, Hazel Holt (a colleague from the International African Institute) and Hilary Pym (her younger sister), add useful summaries at the beginning of each section. It feels like they have a light touch, but I guess their main influence is in what they choose to include and leave out. They respect Pym's privacy by not filling in the deliberate gaps in her diary when pages are torn or cut out. (I'm learning that Paula Byrne's biography, which I'm currently reading, explains these gaps and conjectures what they are hiding.)

Pym, as ever, is good company. As a student, she's very sociable and gets involved in numerous love affairs with men, sometimes more than one at a time. However, she lets herself be taken advantage of. She has zero chill and develops unrequited infatuations. During the war she develops a sense of duty and female solidarity - although she again obsesses over an unattainable man. Then she joins the Wrens and goes to Naples for the end of the war.

On her return to London after the war, she gets a job, begins to write, keeps notebooks, and starts to publish novels. In the 1960s, she begins a lovely correspondence with Philip Larkin, which was how I got into Pym in the first place. This sees her through the 16 barren years when she went unpublished and also led to her renaissance with the help of Larkin and Lord David Cecil's endorsements in the TLS. These last years are happy but cut short by illness.

This is a lovely way to learn more about a writer's life: through her own words and private thoughts. It was a delightful read - particularly the letters to Larkin and the notebooks full of funny observations and mini scenes from novels. You really get a sense of her personality and how it developed over time.

"Some Do Not…", Book 1 in "Parade's End" by Ford Madox Ford - audiobook review

The first book in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End tetralogy, beautifully narrated in this audiobook version by Bill Nighy (He Do the Police in Different Voices). The slow, patient accumulation of character detail had me gripped from the beginning when Christopher Tietjens and Vincent Macmaster are on the train to Rye for a weekend of golf. The sense of period is immense: Edwardian, stiff, snobbish, superior, imperial, class-obsessed, on the cusp of war. I have to admit that, as an audiobook, I sometimes felt lost in the non-linear narrative (Tietjens is back from the war in part 2 - had I missed a bit?!), but I let it wash over me like an oil painting, focusing on the tiny brushstrokes and trusting that, over time, enough of the bigger picture would clarify. (And, when I read the Wikipedia plot summary afterwards, I realized that I really hadn't missed much of the story and nuance.) It truly is a masterpiece of audiobook narration by Nighy. And I have continued straight on to No More Parades.

"Quartet in Autumn" by Barbara Pym - book review

Barbara Pym was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for this book in 1977, which was eventually awarded to Staying On by Paul Scott (which I read at school). Of the Pym I've read so far, this definitely felt like the most literary of her novels: right from the beginning the theme and variations of the quartet of characters (Edwin, Normal, Letty, and Marcia) hums and vibrates. Once more she returns to the same trusty materials: the unmarried, lapsed engagements, domestic life, libraries, the church, vicars, eating lunch in London restaurants, women's expected emotional and domestic labour, the fecklessness and stupidity of men. But in her 16-year hiatus of unpublished underappreciation, she seems to have matured as a writer as she matured in age. Her subjects are, like her, older and autumnal; her themes deeper, concerning the place of her characters within society, the imperfect welfare state, the world of work, and the loss of power and status of the church.

These people are not likeable, but I found myself warming to them and rooting for them. Who else could turn milk bottles, garden sheds, and tinned foods into such poignant and loaded objects?

The pacing is also a marked change: the focus shifts rapidly and seamlessly between each of the four main characters and sometimes beyond them like a melody dovetailed between instruments. One sometimes loses track of their separate identities: which woman dyes her hair again? Who lives in their own house and who in a bedsit? Which one of them was married before? Pym's own love of snooping on people is a constant refrain: Marcia following Norman into the British Museum at lunchtime; Edwin and Norman both finding themselves outside Marcia's house, subconsciously checking up on her; Marcia spying on her beloved surgeon Mr Strong's house in Dulwich; Mrs Pope, Letty's landlady, waiting until Letty went out before looking through her things to find out more about her; the social worker, Janice Brabner, checking up on Marcia; Marcia's neighbours, Priscilla and Nigel, watching her in the garden - I'm sure there are other examples I'm forgetting.

This book didn't fill me with the same Pymsy pure delight as Excellent Women; it's colder, more sombre, closer to death, old age, and loneliness, but it's no less impressive and compelling. I can see why this book broke through. Touching, sad, heartbreaking, but not without hope and humble joy.

"An Unsuitable Attachment" by Barbara Pym - book review

This was the book that was rejected by Pym's publisher and caused the hiatus in her publishing career. It may have been old-fashioned in the early 60s, but it just feels like a period piece now and not out of place amongst the rest of her novels that I've read so far (Excellent Women, Less Than Angels, and Crampton Hodnet). The title is nicely ambiguous: there are a number of unsuitable attachments in the novel: be that the vicar (Mark) and his wife (Sophia); Sophia and her cat, Faustina; Rupert and Ianthe; Rupert and Penelope; Mervyn and Ianthe; Basil Branche and Ianthe; or Ianthe and Paul. Once more, Pym draws an attractive main female character, Ianthe, who has good taste and nice things. Once more, Pym recycles characters from previous novels, including Mildred and Everard Bone from Excellent Women (although, sadly, Mildred was ill on the day of the dinner party and couldn't attend); and Esther Clovis and other anthropologists from Less Than Angels. I love how she does this. They sometimes feel like the non-speaking characters in The Archers (in a good way): one feels they have full and rounded lives, just lived beyond the margins. There's also an interesting E. M. Forster-style parish holiday to Rome. Pym is brilliant at describing the characters' dashed hopes of a quiet moment with their beloved. Again I raced through this in about a week. I know of no other writer who can extract so much drama from a Christmas bazaar, a garden party, or a dinner party. I love me some Pym. Next up: the novel that ended her hiatus and earned her a Booker Prize nomination: Quartet in Autumn.