Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym

The title of Barbara Pym’s first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle, might not seem to have any connection to the plot, but the quote appears early in the novel:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:

Something to love, oh, something to love! (Thomas Haynes Bayly)

I happen to share that feeling–people need something to love, and if there’s no person available, then let it be a dog, a cat, a hamster, or a budgie. If push comes to shove, a plant will do. Even my neighbor has his Harley Davidson since his missus departed for less turbulent pastures. Anyway, the need to have something to love is evident in Some Tame Gazelle, the story of two spinster sisters, Harriet and Belinda Bede, in their fifties whose lives are built around the local church and its clergymen. The sisters live together in a life of genteel comfort, and while they can afford a maid, there’s a little nip and tuck when it comes to meals if no guests are expected at the table. The two sisters are completely different: Belinda, the eldest sister is a romantic introvert whose male ideal, somewhat incongruously is the ”dear Earl of Rochester.” Yes, Belinda in many ways is someone who doesn’t get the nuances of character as we later see through Belinda’s decades long devotion to the unrequited love of her university days–now the local, pompous married Archdeacon Hoccleve. Harriet, on the other hand, is an extrovert, a plump flirt who obsesses about her appearance, and always has a crush on whichever young, pink-cheeked, innocent curate is assigned to the local church. She’s a groupie of sorts: ”She was especially given to cherishing young clergymen, and her frequent excursions to the curates’ lodgings had often given rise to talk.”

The novel begins with bubbling excitement over the new curate’s attendance at dinner. Belinda is fully expecting Harriet “to be quite as silly over him as she had been over his predecessors,” and the relationships Harriet has with the series of curates who’ve passed through seem to cover all sorts of roles from surrogate mother & sons to vague courtship.  One of Harriet’s problems is that she doesn’t know whether to mother the curate du jour or giggle and flirt with him. Needless to say she does both–but she’s not alone in the parish when it comes to fussing over the curate. This seems to be a popular pastime with the single women, and whether or not they are too old to be jealously possessive about the highly-prized curate is beside the point. But in spite of the slight awkwardness generated when a mid-fities spinster fusses over a single man young enough to be her son, those involved seem happy with the arrangement. It’s one of those ‘no damage done’ situations with everyone glossing over the possibly unhealthy ramifications of these relationships. Harriet immerses herself in questions such as ‘is the curate getting proper meals?’ and whether he needs a new of pair of hand-knitted socks. For their part, the curates benefit by getting regular free meals.

So while the novel opens with the exciting prospect (for Harriet, at least) of a fresh, young, curate, The Reverend Edgar Donne, Belinda faces the thrill of the Archdeacon’s wife, Agatha going away on holiday and leaving her obnoxious husband behind. To Belinda, of course, the Archdeacon, “dear Henry,” can do no wrong, but we get a glimpse of the domestic trials of being married to the Archdeacon–an immature man of insufferable ego and full of constant complaints:

Belinda recognized the voice as that of the Archdeacon. He was leaning out of one of the upper windows, calling to Agatha, and he sounded very peevish. Belinda thought he looked handsome in his dark green dressing-gown with his hair all ruffled. The years had dealt kindly with him and he had grown neither bald nor fat.  It was Agatha who seemed to have suffered most. Her pointed face had lost the elfin charm which had delighted many and now looked drawn and harassed.

Belinda cannot fathom the reason behind Agatha’s bad temper and thinks that “Agatha should humour dear Henry a little more.” This is a position of some naiveté as Belinda, who has never moved beyond idealized love, has no idea how grueling married relationships can be and just how taxing and demanding her idol Henry really is. The prospect of Henry alone creates no small amount of speculation between the sisters and raises the question whether or not the Archdeacon is upset or delighted by his wife’s absence.

When the day came for Agatha to go away, Belinda and Harriet watched her departure out of Belinda’s bedroom window. From here there was an excellent view of the vicarage drive and gate. Belinda had brought some brass with her to clean and in the intervals when she stopped her vigorous rubbing to look out the window, was careful to display the duster in her hand. Harriet stared out quite unashamedly, with nothing in her hand to excuse her presence there. She even had a pair of binoculars, which she was trying to focus.

With Agatha away, the Archdeacon makes more visits to the Bede household, and Belinda makes a few visits to the vicarage. Vague long-distant memoires and lost opportunities are stirred accompanied by just a whisper of mild discontent.

How odd if Henry were a widower, she thought suddenly. How embarrassing, really.  It would be like going back thirty years. Or wouldn’t it? Belinda soon saw that it wouldn’t. For she was now a contented spinster and her love was like a warm, comfortable garment, bedsocks, perhaps, or even woolen combinations; certainly something without glamour or romance. All the same, it was rather nice to think that Henry might prefer her to Agatha, although she knew perfectly well that he didn’t. It was one of the advantages of being the one he hadn’t married that one could be in a position to imagine such things.

Some Tame Gazelle makes some interesting statements about love; we see Belinda still in love, decades past the initial onset, and she cannot see that the Archdeacon is flawed and not really worth her worshipful attention, and yet does that really matter? There are a couple of times when reality punctures Belinda’s image of the Archdeacon, but she turns away from her perceived disloyalty and criticism and chooses to keep her perfect image of the Archdeacon. Harriet, is a study is serial adoration, and she smoothly moves her infatuations from one curate to another. While no great crisis occurs in this delightful, humorous  novel of manners, nonetheless the calm, orderly world of the Bede sisters is threatened by the arrival of two eligible men including one of Harriet’s long-lost curates, now middle-aged Bishop Theo Grote,  who returns from darkest Africa. According to Belinda, Bishop Grote “doesn’t have all his goods in the shop window,” and as one of Harriet’s past pet-project curates, he’s now a eligible bachelor….

A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

“It seemed as though life had been going on around me without my knowing it, in the disconcerting way that it sometimes does, like the traffic swirling past when one is standing on an island in the middle of the road.”

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a soft spot for the unreliable narrator, but in Barbara Pym’s exquisite Novel of Manners, A Glass of Blessings, we have an unobservant narrator–quite a curiosity when you think about it. After all, we rely on the narrator to fill us in on what is going on, but here we have someone who is often clueless and certainly the last person to understand the implications of the events around her.

First a bit about Barbara Pym (1913-1980)–a novelist who happens to be a great favourite of mine and is horribly under-rated. Pym never wrote a bad novel. Quartet in Autumn, a novel that concerns 4 single civil servants post-retirement is one of my all-time favourite books.  Her characters are often mired in the minutia of the worlds of anthropology, fusty academia, or the clergy: all great stomping grounds for the raw material to create novels. Pym’s stories are on the quiet side of life, so we read about lonely spinsters, confused vicars, the pettiness of church functions, and the hum-drum nature of village life.  A Glass of Blessings is an affectionate portrait of a young woman in 1950s Britain, Wilmet (named after a character on a Charlotte Yonge novel), a young married, childless woman who longs to be useful. Wilmet actually leads a very privileged life; she and her husband, Rodney live with his mother Sybil in her London home. Meals are arranged thoughtfully for Wilmet by her kind, sagacious mother-in-law, and the household chores are performed by a servant, and while all the day-to-day work is completed seemingly effortlessly and invisibly, thirty-three-year-old Wilmet feels superfluous. Not that she wants to take over the household management or start scrubbing floors. After all, she knows other women who ‘have’ to work and genteel spinsters who’ve gone down in the world and need to supplement their meager incomes.  So rather than think of getting a job, Wilmet tries to be “useful” through various projects, and given to incongruous thoughts & flights of imagination, she sets out to improve Piers Longridge, the underemployed, somewhat mysterious wastrel brother of her best friend, and to make a friend of dowdy spinster, Mary Beamish, whose enthusiasm for self-sacrifice and good works makes Wilmet “feel particularly useless,” rather inadequate and gratingly irritated.

Not a great deal happens in the novel–no great drama, but instead we see the people in Wilmet’s daily life and how she mis-reads situations in the months covered by the novel.  In many ways A Glass of Blessings is a direct 20th century link to Jane Austen’s Emma. Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse is someone who wants to dabble in match-making until her plots explode in her face. Wilmet, on the other hand, is just trying to carve a place for herself in the world and not having a great deal of success. Both Emma Woodhouse and Wilmet don’t see the obvious–the stuff that everyone else around them understands, and yet Emma and Wilmet are never the object of ridicule. While other books delve into the depths of passion through adultery and dynamic love affairs conducted by bored married women, Wilmet, without consciously realizing it, toys with these notions through the somewhat awkward attentions of her best friend Rowena’s husband, and the ever-growing importance she places on her friendship with Piers. Other quiet dramas in the novel concern Sybil and Wilmet’s Portuguese lessons, where the new curate, the very good-looking Father Ransome will live, the excitement of  blood donation, committee meetings, a trip to the hairdressers, and various ecclesiastical events.

Rather refreshingly, Sybil as Wilmet’s mother-in-law is an interesting character who likes her daughter-in-law. She is sympathetic to women who are married and juggle work and home responsibilities, considering them ”splendid and formidable.”

I read in the paper the other day of a woman civil servant who was discovered preparing Brussels Sprouts behind a filing cabinet–poor thing, I suppose she felt it would save a few precious ten minutes when she got home.

Since a great deal of the novel concerns Wilmet trying to find a spot for herself in the world, it should come as no surprise that various characters possess specific notions of what a woman should and shouldn’t do. In one scene, for example, a colleague of Rodney’s comes to dinner and Wilmet asks for a dry Martini:

A shadow, surely of displeasure, seemed to cross James Cash’s face, and I guessed that he was probably one of those men who disapprove of women drinking spirits –or indeed of anyone drinking gin before a meal.

Part of Wilmet’s charm, and she really is very charming, is that she doesn’t really ever grasp what is wrong with her life and yet she doesn’t explicitly complain or even recognize that in many ways she’s caught in a shifting time. She’s the class of woman who’s not supposed to work, and since she has no home or children to occupy her, that leaves charity work–something that doesn’t have a strong appeal.  She’s “tried one or two part-time jobs,” but Rodney has “old-fashioned idea that wives should not work unless it was financially necessary.” While there’s no economic hardship, and Wilmet is very well taken care of (some could say pampered) she’s adrift without even fully realizing it. She’s so naïve that she doesn’t realize that she faces a quiet crisis in her life and in her marriage.

Here’s Wilmet thinking about her birthday present from her husband:

“And that reminds me, I saw Griffin at lunchtime and arranged about your present.”

“Thank you, darling.” Mr. Griffin was Rodney’s bank manager. I imagined the scene, dry and businesslike: the transfer of a substantial sum of money to my account, nothing really spontaneous or romantic about it. Still, perhaps something good and solid like money was better than the extravagant bottle of French scent that some husbands–my friend Rowena’s, for example–might have given. And the whole thing was somehow characteristic of Rodney and those peculiarly English qualities which had seemed so lovable when we had first met in Italy during the war and I had been homesick for damp green English churchyards and intellectual walks and talks in the park on a Saturday afternoon.

A great deal of Wilmet’s time is spent either thinking about the local church, St Luke’s with its High Anglican ceremonies or attending social events there. But in spite of this, A Glass of Blessings is not a religious novel in any sense of the word, so religious faith or conversion doesn’t appear–although Wilmet does make a rather limp effort to drag Piers off to various services. The church is seen as the centre of Wilmet’s life, and so the focus is on the impact created by the installation of a new male housekeeper at the vicarage who lavishes the rather worldly, and soon-to-retire father Thames with exotic dishes while bemoaning the plebian, boorish tastes of the much more down-to-earth Father Bode. Not everyone in the novel has religious beliefs. Wilmet’s mother-in-law, Sybil and her  “ bleakly courageous agnosticism”  is shared by her son, and Piers is an atheist. Sybil also believes in ‘good works’ through social endeavors, and while her interests do not enter the realm of ecclesiastical authority, she supports Wilmet in her church functions and attends tea parties with some of the parishioners including “distressed gentlewoman” the heavily-rouged Miss Prideaux.

Back to commonalities with Austen, Pym is also very generous to her characters. Both authors find the foibles of human nature greatly amusing, and both authors find rich material in daily life and in the social exchanges between characters.  A Glass of Blessings is the marvelous story of Wilmet’s maturation–not a particularly easy process for someone who is protected from the harsh realities of the world.

Review copy.

Ménage by Alix Kates Shulman

Heather and Mack McKay’s marriage is in trouble–not overtly, and on the surface of things, they may seem to lead an enviable life, but when Alix Kates Shulman’s witty, intelligent comedy of manners Ménage begins, the rot is creeping into the foundations. Mack, at 36, is phenomenally successful & wealthy.  The CEO of his own company, he’s moved his wife, Heather away from her New York career, to their ecologically designed  ’dream home’ in Wildbloom, New Jersey, built in homage to her “green ideals.” Heather, who once had pretensions to a writing career, has shelved those ambitions and now runs her home (and two children with the appropriate hired help) while soothing her ego with ecology articles for an online journal, The Ecology of Everyday Life. Mack’s continuing absences, facilitated by a small private plane, have left Heather marooned on the mountaintop home, resentful that she abandoned her career, and suspicious that Mack is having affairs:

Not that Mack flaunted his affairs or was indiscreet; he was so discreet that she had virtually nothing to confront him with. Still, there were too many signs to ignore: guilty gifts to her; his evasive behaviour when he returned from a trip; the way he disappeared in his plane every Sunday of the increasingly rare weekends when he was home; and most tellingly, her inability to reach him, though he knew it made her anxious when he turned off his phone.

Mack flies to L.A often and his continual “jabbering” about the glamorous sexually rapacious Hollywood-connected Maja Stern, leads Heather to suspect that Maja is Mack’s latest conquest, but she’s only partially correct. Following Maja’s typically dramatic break-up with has-been Balkan writer, Zoltan Barbu, she commits suicide. Mack misses out on his intended affair with Maja, and although he flew to L.A. to have dinner with Maja (hopefully followed by a passionate session in bed,) he finds himself, instead, attending Maja’s funeral as she had “chosen instead to dine alone on Seconal.” So by page 25, Mack runs into Zoltan Barbu at Maja’s funeral, and Zoltan suspects Mack must be Maja’s latest and final conquest:

Now that Maja was in no position to contradict him, Mack was tempted to use the traditional male prerogative of claiming the sexual victory that had so far eluded him but that he hoped to perhaps secure that very night. On the other hand, there was undoubtedly a certain moral benefit attached to proclaiming fidelity to one’s wife. He didn’t know which response was more likely to win Zoltan’s admiration and confidence. Which was more appropriate to the circumstances? Mack whipped out his handkerchief and coughed into it for the full thirty seconds it took to weigh the pros and cons of each response before saying, “Just friends.”

Zoltan, down on his luck, penniless, and about to be evicted from his grotty apartment accepts Mack’s seemingly kind offer of a plane ticket to New Jersey and a room in his home where Zoltan can write his next magnum opus undisturbed. It’s an open-ended offer–one which comes with no expiration date, but Zoltan is intelligent enough to understand that Mack, a man he considers a philistine, must be getting something out of the deal too. And of course, he is. Mack is delighted by the prospect of Zoltan moving in–after all, he thinks that a writer on the premises, a cultural trophy,  may help inspire Heather, and also Zoltan’s intellectual presence in the home helps assuage Mack’s guilt about leaving. Does Mack, who triumphantly carries Zoltan to his home rather as one might bring home an exotic new pet, see Zoltan as a substitute?

Deception, self-deception, shifting alliances and multiple mis-readings are all part of this deliriously witty novel. A marriage is an impenetrable relationship at the best of times, and in Ménage, author Alix Kates Shulman creates three characters who are all unhappy with their lives for various reasons, and who each see someone else in this delicately awkward triangle as the solution to their problems. Will Zoltan heal and revitalize the McKays’ marriage or bury it? The plot’s light and wise humour is assisted by the fact that none of the three main characters are pleasant people: There’s the hopelessly crass Mack who believes problems are solved by throwing money around, and then there’s Heather who’s idiotic enough to pride herself on being environmentally friendly even as she lives in her mountaintop mansion whose solar panels allow her to bury the fact that her husband is hardly saving the planet with his solo flights to L.A to catch a meal with an attractive woman. And then there’s Zoltan…part fraud, part hipster. Is he using the McKays or are they using him? And the answer to that question is entirely in the hands of the reader.

A throughly enjoyable read, Ménage is a novel version of the best of Woody Allen films, and I’m specifically thinking Husband and Wives (it can be no coincidence that Woody Allen is mentioned in the novel). The politics of any marriage are delicate; add a third person and the results can be unpredictable. While my favourite section occurs when Heather and Mack’s friends, Barbara and Abe Rabin arrive as “witnesses,” one of my favourite quotes is this:

Everything Heather said plunged Zoltan deeper into confusion. He feared that her eyes, bright with passion, would fill up and overflow again. The tears he had found charming his first night in this house now seemed as dangerous as Maja’s. Were all women the same? What he needed was solitude; what she needed was company: irreconcilable differences. She was daily becoming less fascinating and more terrifying, like a North American Madame Bovary: self-destructive, incapable of foresight, in love with danger

Author Alix Kates Shulman is considered an early radical feminist, and she’s arguably best known for her novel (which I haven’t read) Memoirs of a Prom Queen. When I first started reading Ménage and scrapped away the surface of Heather’s thwarted career, I thought I was about to read a fairly typical story of a woman who sacrifices self to the many demands of home life. Well yes in a way that’s true, but Shulman’s novel is far cleverer than that, and with wicked humour, the plot explores the delicate politics of marriage and its unspoken, treacherous negotiations.

Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Other Press.