Barbara Pym’s Last Title

Abstract

A STORY IS TOLD by Hazel Holt, junior colleague of Barbara Pym at the International African Institute, then close friend for life, then editor and biographer (while herself a good novelist). She records how late she was in coming to read her future colleague’s first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle. She had assumed that it was some repulsive account of big-game hunting in Africa. When she at last opened it, she was entranced.1 I like this story because my own experience was so similar. Clearly, Pym’s titles may sometimes be rather special. It would be safe to suppose that this wasn’t from mere whim or incapacity. Pym was a born writer, who would probably have liked to be a poet, as the more glamorous calling. But her gifts were for that real human world of small things that gave the novel its character, as far back as Defoe. Richly accurate as she could be, she yet worked through the excellent and unpretentious medium of ‘entertainment literature’ or romance, as a good number of the best literary artists in Britain before her had done. But loving poetry as she did, she would take a title from nineteenth century verse (Some Tame Gazelle) or seventeenth (A Glass of Blessings) even when she had to adapt it (No Fond Return of Love). These articulate memories of a classic past bring a certain half-ironic authority to the often extremely funny if touching romances that follow the titles, an effect of course increased by the frequent counterpoint of verse quotations inside the story.