Gotham Diary:
Pym and Taylor
1 May 2013
The most pronounced symptom of spring fever this season is that I’m reading like a teenager. All I want to do is curl up with a good book. The difference is that I’ve read the books before. I’m not reading anything new. For the first time — and about time! — I’m going through the library in search of books that I’ve liked if not loved, and replacing a vague sense of my own taste with something clearer, something more like a reading list.
The same friend who warned me off the new Claire Messud (“too women’s studies”) has been reading Barbara Pym for the first time, so I thought I’d read something for the second. I chose the most unfamiliar title, The Sweet Dove Died. I couldn’t remember a thing about the book, and I had no feeling of having read it before. It is certainly not Pym’s strongest effort, partly because it spends too much time in the head of a James Boyce, a very good-looking but rather dim and confused young man. A bored young man, really. We spend even more time with Leonora Eyre, a fiftyish matron (maiden, more like) with beautiful taste, especially in clothes, and a cool elegance that comes across as frosty and repellent. She is given to mild bouts of scheming and self-deceit that bring Emmeline Lucas (“Lucia”) to mind, but nothing ridiculous befalls. James, whose sexual identity is palpably unclear to everyone, pays court to Leonora, which she likes very much, because he is very respectful and, with her, carnally inert. James meets a girl, Phoebe, and falls into bed with her a couple of times, but the principal yield of this liaison is Phoebe’s disappointment and Leonora’s jealousy. (In Leonora’s eyes, the youthfully shambolic Phoebe is undeserving of James.) Then, on holiday in Spain, James is picked up by an American grad student called Ned. Ned is a nasty piece of work, and it’s a pity that Pym doesn’t do more with him.
“Oh, Jimmie, that conscience again! So you’re still fond of her — what does ‘fond’ mean? So you hurt her — but that’s what loving is, hurting and being hurt. Believe me, I know.“
They had had this conversation before and it had occurred to James more than once to wonder whether Ned had ever been hurt himself or whether he had always been the one to do the hurting.
“I’ve had to hurt people so many times,” Ned went on. “Oh, Jimmie, it tears one apart!”
“It might tear the other person apart too,” James observed, with a cynicism unusual in him. “I’ll go an see here tomorrow.”
For a moment Ned looked almost anxious but the shadow soon passed from his face. James would be no exception to the rule that nobody tired of Ned before he tired of them.
It would have been great fun to read the story that showed Ned up.
Pym’s eye for detail carries her away, giving the novel the texture of a series of to-do lists. and second thoughts about same, that damps the sparks of humor.
Christmas was no almost upon them. It had come round again in its inexorable way, with its attendant embarrassments which this year seemed even more numerous than usual. Ned was going to have to spend it in Oxford with his friends, who were rather hurt by his neglect of them. The evening before he went James took him out to dinner to give him his Christmas present, a pair of expensive cuff link.s This had been comparatively easy to choose, for all Ned asked of a present was that it should cost the giver a lot of money. Leonora’s had been much more difficult. The Sunday paper colour supplements offered no advice on what to give an older woman towards whom one was conscious of having behaved badly. Anything like the Victorian ‘love tokens’ of the past seemed inappropriate, so James eventually chose a picture book of reproductions of Victorian paintings. He knew that Leonora would be disappointed; even if she did not show it in her face, her tone of voice when she thanked him would betray it, as Miss Caton’s had when he opened the book of poetry Phoebe had sent him for his holiday. Books of presents were somehow lacking in excitement and romance. He was relieved when he learned that Humphrey was giving her a pair of amethyst earrings and hoped that his uncle’s present would in some way make up for his inadequacy, though he really knew it would not. James himself was going to winter sports as usual with what Humphrey called “a pretty group of young people,” making them seem something very remote from himself and Leonora.
From this busy surface life of engagements and things, all deep feelings (if any) are bolted away. Every now and then, Leonora sheds a tear for the loneliness of her life, but she is always in bed when she does so; when she is up and dressed, she embraces her way of life with iron determination and plenty of contempt for weaker souls. She is something of a monster, still hale and hearty enough to keep up the bluff of being an attractive woman — but to what end? To Humphrey (James’s uncle), she is simply a tease, all dolled up but unresponsive to his amorous advances, as though they were in bad taste. As for James, Ned puts it well: “Jimmie was a sweet boy, but as time went on the innocence and naîvety which had first attracted Ned became tedious, even pitiful, and they seemed to have less and less in common. Jimmie was not very intelligent, had little sense of humour and was always ‘around’ in a way that began to be irritating.” The reader cannot feel much different.
When the book was over, I felt that Pym had not played her cards very well. The characters had not been dealt out properly. The plot depends too heavily on shifts in James’s living accommodations: his furniture is moved about a great deal. This occasions scheming, as I say, but not much interest. If James were to work at the center of the novel, he would have to be a mystery, closed and silent, his thoughts unknown to us. Phoebe and Ned — I should have liked to throw them in a box and see who came out alive. Leonora is mildly dented at the end, but still an half-hearted vamp, doomed to become ludicrous. Things might have worked out with Humphrey, but the timing was off; he comes to see her as ageing and tired, and he gives up on her as a prospective lover.
The writing, too, seemed flat, almost pedestrian. I was often reminded of Ruth Rendell’s less thrilling stories about odd people in London (Portobello, for example). The everyday psychopathology of Pym’s bored and boring characters left me dispirited. Needing a tonic, I remembered a story by Elizabeth Taylor that made a powerful impact when I read it last summer, “The Ambush,” so I went and found that.
It was like following a clavichord sonata by CPE Bach with one of his father’s great organ toccatas. Pym’s washed-out pastels gave way to gorgeous beauty, pregnant with constrained passion. “The Ambush” is set at an inviting old house on the banks of the Thames. Taylor sets many of her stories in this part of England, but none is so enchanted. A young woman returns to the home of her boyfriend, about a month after his death in an automobile accident, at the invitation of the young man’s mother. Catherine has been bottling up her grief, trying not to yield to scenes and sobs, and in general making everyone around her nervous; when she goes off to Mrs Ingram’s, her parents are relieved to “come down from their tightrope and relax.”
We care about Catherine because of the very uncertainty of her situation.
Uncertain, during those weeks, how much grief was suitable to her — for she and Noël had not been officially engaged and in the eyes of the world she saw her status as a mourner undecided — she had shown no sign of sorrow, for one tear might release the rest and one word commit her to too many others. Her fortitude was prodigious…
Noël’s mother, Mrs Ingram, is something of a sorceress. Catherine, we are told, “had wanted to be her daughter-in-law and part of the enchantment.” But the two women do not spend much time together, and Catherine wonders why she has been asked to the house. She spends most of the time, when she is not alone, with the brother, Esmé, whom she only met at Noël’s funeral. Esmé lives abroad and seems to have a life apart; he is visited by a Ned-like creature called Freddie. (Taylor’s biographer, Nicola Beauman, calls Esmé “the only obvious homosexual in Elizabeth’s work,” but I’m not so sure that anything is obvious.) Esmé and Catherine boat up and down the river, just as Catherine used to do with Noël. “Another thing about the river,” Esmé says, “we can quite safely bring our unhappiness here. No one can each it or be contaminated by it, as on dry land.” This is enchantment, too, and Catherine is within the spell.
Near the end of the story, Catherine accompanies Mrs Ingram to the graveyard, to freshen the flowers at Noël’s grave. In a long, beautifully written paragraph, Taylor deftly shifts between the summer afternoon on a shady lane and Catherine’s apprehensiveness about encountering “some overpowering monument,” resolving the two with the transcending image of “groves of Ingrams.”
Unlike most of the other riverside families, this had kept its bones in one place for at least two hundred years.
Noël’s grave, upon which the earth has not settled, is marked only by a wooden cross.
Catherine took a step back, as if she might otherwise sink with the earth. She felt obscenity, not peace, around her.
“Obscenity” comes as a bit of rude surprise, but then we realize that Catherine is, for once, not fretting but feeling.
“The Ambush” ends ambiguously — but powerfully, as powerfully as it has been throughout. Quite unable to go on reading, I was reminded of Wallace Stevens’s line: “This is the barrenness / of the fertile thing that can attain no more.”
But I must pick a better Pym next time.