Islanders Who Read

Abstract

ra Pym, produces a sensationalism that is almost immediately suppressed. From something she said to me in one of the Pym years, I believe that the origin of that perception of disturbing chasms beneath the social surface (which, dreamlike, proceeds unruffled) lay far beyond our time. The anthropologists who knew Barbara Pym were individually quite different and did not necessarily know each other well. I think, however, that proof-reading all those monographs did teach her something. She used to speculate (note the theme I have just mentioned) on whether an anthropologist could go to the south of France, idling away his research grant, and create a complete monograph on a non-existent tribe. She simply created her genre (once from Angela Thirkell, post-exilically from Compton-Bumett) and populated it with slight dissonant creatures. In 1978, when she had retired to Finstock, I invited her to dinner at St John's. The College feast was elaborate and I said 'It must be the beginning of your Oxford novel'. (She looked as if she would comment but left unmentioned that her pre-war one was actually in existence-Crampton Hodnet.) Some time later I was coming out of the Oxfam shop in Broad Street with my wife, carrying (quite uncharacteristically) a newly-purchased print of Old St Pancras Church, when we bumped into Barbara and her sister. I said that her presence had clearly turned me into one of her characters. They had been to the hospital. Barbara said 'I happen to have upon me a piece I did for the New Yorker in memory of the St John's dinner.' She inscribed for us an off-print of 'Across a Crowded Room'. She did not meet any (by now matured) lost love at the dinner, as I recall, but this little-known short story on that theme probably forms a slender romantic link between the Oxford of her last years and that of 1936, when as we know from her autobiographical writings, that loss in a sense actually began. That was that last time I saw her.