My "Friendship" with Barbara Pym

     For every passionate reader, there are certain authors he or she turns to again and again for the simple reason that reading them is like a cozy get-together with old friends. For me, one of those authors is Barbara Pym. Every couple of years, I re-read some of her novels to cleanse my reading palate and wash off the literary excess accumulated from reading more verbose writers. Her ability to paint a vivid character portrait with a single phrase, the humor that sneaks up on you and tweaks your most ticklish spot, and her uncanny gift for moving you unexpectedly with a strangely detached yet penetrating pathos -- these are the qualities I cherish in her writing. The fact that she was English and wrote the most "English" of all twentieth-century English novels further endears her to this unabashed Anglophile. Whenever I discuss her with an Englishman, his first comment is, "She's very English." To which I reply, "Yes, that's one of the reasons I like her so much."
     It was my love for Jane Austen, to whom she is often likened, that first prompted me to seek out Pym. I ran out of Jane and needed to find more of her ilk. Oddly, the first time I read Pym, I didn't care for her and couldn't even finish the novel, which was An Academic Question. In retrospect, I think that was the wrong novel to start with, it being one of her posthumously published novels that she never got around to revising herself. (Hazel Holt prepared the manuscript for publication.) I decided to give Barbara another chance a few years later, happily with Excellent Women, her most widely-read title and considered by many to be her best. I was hooked for life. Lesson learned -- when embarking on a writer who is new to you, always do a little research first, to find out which is his/her most popular and/or acclaimed work. No point in trusting your own judgment and risking a less than impressive first impression.
     Unfortunately, since she is dead, there will most probably be no more new Pym for me to delight in, though I understand there is still unpublished material lying around. After devouring all her novels, plus A Very Private Eye (diaries and letters), A Lot to Ask (Holt's biography), and many critical writings on her work, I scouted around for similar authors ("similar" according to reviewers and dust jacket blurbs): Anita Brookner (too relentlessly sober), Elizabeth Bowen (too dense with sensibility), Muriel Spark (too barbed and quirky), Elizabeth Taylor (closer, but still too far), and others. (With the exception of Spark, I do very much like these authors for their own particular merits, and read them regularly.) I came to the conclusion that no one quite matches Pym's unique blend of gentle/wry/subtly bawdy humor, her detached/penetrating perspicacity, and that dead-on-target verbal economy which is the hallmark of a truly gifted writer. So I will content myself with re-readings every couple of years. After all, I don't see even my very best friends more often than that, so each reunion is truly a time to treasure. Why should Barbara be any different?