Book review: “Some Tame Gazelle” by Barbara Pym

Barbara Pym wrote Some Tame Gazelle in the mid-1930s, shortly after she graduated from Oxford University, and it was rejected by several publishers.  After World War II, she revised it, and, in 1950, it was published by Jonathan Cape.

Until 1962, she had a small career as a minor British novelist, but, for the next fifteen years, Pym was unable to get any new books published.

Then, in January, 1977, the Times Literary Supplement published an article in which well-known authors and academics named the writer whom they believed was the most under-rated. Two — poet Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil — pointed to the 63-year-old Pym, and, suddenly, her literary career was revived.

By the end of 1977, she published her masterwork Quartet in Autumn, a darker and more moody book than the six comic novels that had preceded it, and she followed with The Sweet Dove Died the next year.

Alas, Pym herself died of breast cancer in January, 1980, at the age of 66, almost exactly three years after the Times article. Over the next seven years, five more of her novels — originally written in 1936, 1940, 1963, 1972 and 1979 — were published posthumously.

 

Quirky sensibility

You don’t need to know any of this to enjoy Some Tame Gazelle, but Pym’s quirky literary history does give a sense of her quirky sensibility.

Neither do you need to know that, in sitting down to write Some Tame Gazelle in 1934, Pym, then all of 22, pictured herself and her sister Hilary as the two spinsters in their fifties at the center of the novel, Belinda and Harriet Bede.  And that she surrounded Belinda and Harriet with a cast of characters based on her Oxford circle of friends.

Still, it may give you a sense of the inside jokes and humor that Pym and her friends were enjoying underneath the light-touch comedy and social observation that’s there for any reader to relish.

 

Her Pride and Prejudice

And you don’t need to know that Larkin, her longtime friend, described the novel as Pym’s Pride and Prejudice.

Like Jane Austen’s great novel, Some Tame Gazelle describes a world in which everyone is pretty foolish — which is to say, pretty human.  Some have no hint of their own foolishness which makes much of what they do and say very delicious.  But some, such as Belinda, around whom the story unfolds, are more self-aware.  And that ability to see her own silliness is one of many ways in which Belinda is endearing.

Pride and Prejudice, however, is about young women seeking to marry.  After all, it famously starts, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Pym’s novel is about middle-aged spinsters dealing with romance at a distance.  Harriet is ostensibly on the hunt for a husband, but the one suitor who routinely asks her is just as routinely turned down.

Belinda isn’t looking for love.  Instead, she is holding — for better and worse, for pleasure and pain, close to her heart — her love for the Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve who, when they were at university, would read poetry to her but now is married to Agatha, the daughter of a bishop and the moving force behind his career.

 

“Having a bath”

Although unswerving in her love for Henry, Belinda isn’t blind, such as early in the novel when she is sewing as Harriet complains about the “depressing” and “horrid thing” the Archdeacon read last Sunday.

“But Harriet,” said Belinda gently.  “Henry was reading a passage from Urn Burial, I thought he read it magnificently,” she sighed.

Of course the real truth of the matter was that poor Henry was too lazy to write sermons of his own and somehow one didn’t think of him as being clever in a theological kind of way.

Belinda finishes her sewing and walks next door to the vicarage to help prepare for the annual garden party.

At the vicarage door, she meets Agatha carrying many bundles and looking harassed. Belinda offers to help and adds that she also needs to see the Archdeacon about recitations by the Sunday School children.

“Henry is having a bath,” said Agatha shortly.

Surely rather late? thought Belinda.  It was past eleven and oughtn’t an archdeacon to rise earlier than that?

“So of course you can’t see him now,” continued Agatha in the same tone of voice, which implied that she had the privilege not allowed to Belinda of seeing an archdeacon in his bath.  “You will have to wait,” she concluded, with a note of something like triumph in her voice.

 

“Silly”

At another time, Belinda is in the wool shop run by Miss Jenner who mentions a conversation she’d had with a travelling salesman. Belinda recalls the “silly” way the storekeeper dotes on such visitors.

Still, poor thing, Belinda thought, the warm tide of easy sentimentality rising up within her, it was probably the only bit of excitement in her drab life.

Miss Jenner lives over the shop with her aged mother. And maybe she’s not alone in her silliness.

And perhaps we are all silly over something or somebody without knowing it; perhaps her own behavior with the Archdeacon was no less silly than Miss Jenner’s with the travelers.  It was a rather disquieting thought.

 

“Well-fed”

Harriet finds herself, at one point in the book, facing a new and unexpected suitor, Mr. Nathaniel Mold, an official at the university library where Belinda once studied.

She tells him: No.

Later, after Mr. Mold has left town, the subject comes up as the two sisters are having tea with the Archdeacon and Dr. Nicholas Parnell, Mr. Mold’s boss and a single man himself.

Sitting around the fire in the Archdeacon’s study, they considered the problem.

“Of course I never advise anyone to enter into that state without long and careful thought,” said Dr. Parnell, “but I should be the last to admit impediments to the marriage of true minds, and it seems to me that you and Nathaniel have a great many tastes in common.”

Harriet denied this indignantly…. “The only thing we have in common is a love of good food,” she said, thinking that Dr. Parnell was being more than usually interfering.  “I could never marry Mr. Mold.”

Nonetheless, she fails to quiet Dr. Parnell who responds with an argument that seems, to him at least, to answer all objections.

“But surely liking the same things for dinner is one of the deepest and most lasting things you could possibly have in common with anyone,” argued Dr. Parnell.

“After all, the emotions of the heart are very transitory, or so I believe; I should think it makes one much happier to be well-fed than well-loved.”

 

“Floury hands”

Some Tame Gazelle is made up of such scenes.  There is very little plot in the sense of things happening.  This is very much a novel about people being rather than doing.

Still, there is a modestly surprising plot twist at the end when, out of nowhere, a high-status visitor to the village interrupts Belinda as she is kneading flour for ravioli and asks her to marry him.

The man — I won’t name him so as not to spoil the surprise if you read the book (but you can be sure it isn’t the Archdeacon who, of course, is already married) — isn’t the most romantic of souls.

In fact, in seeking to convince Belinda to accept his proposal, he says, “I think when one has reached er — riper years, things are different, aren’t they?”

“I’m afraid I can’t marry you,” she said, looking down at her floury hands.  “I don’t love you.”

And that’s about all that needs to be said.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

10.3.24