Civil to strangers and other writings | Stahura Library | TinyCat (2024)

This is Pym's second novel, though it was published only posthumously, in 1987. Art is here close to life; the heroine of the title story, Cassandra (developed from Pym's dream-name Sandra at Oxford?) is the submissive, ironic wife to a writer of fiction and poetry, Adam, named from Paradise Lost,

another who is much given to reading aloud to his lady, as did Pym's fellow student Henry Harvey to her. The book is recognizably suppositious as to the author's possible marriage to Harvey -- wishful thinking plus self-abnegation and a dose of shrewd realism. Cassandra travels to Budapest, as Pym and her sister did in 1935.

Harvey went to Finland in 1934, lecturing at a university, and married a Finnish girl in 1937; Pym wrote her `Finnish novel', which began as letters to him there and finished in 1938 as `Gervase and Flora'. Set in Helsingfors, this is truly a story of unreciprocated love bravely borne.

When World War II began, Pym remained at her parental home in Oswestry, and worked in a military canteen from 1939-41. During this time she wrote the three war stories: `Home Front novel', `So Very Secret' and `Goodbye Balkan Capital'. These all treat of the early years of the war as experienced in the English countryside, and the involvement of English women.

`Home Front Novel' opens with a First Aid class practising bandaging, goes on to show the arrival in a village of a batch of evacuees and the conversion of gardens to vegetable growing.

`So Very Secret' has another Cassandra heroine, `a country woman in early middle age ... My life is filled up with all the activities of a country village in wartime -- Red Cross and canteen work, besides church brasses and flowers'. We see Cassandra doing her canteen duty before she enjoys an espionage adventure in familiar Oxford, a London hotel, and a train from Paddington to the countryside, with an escape into another Red Cross lecture.

In `Goodbye Balkan capital' Laura, a member of the ARP Casualty Service, proud of her tin hat, listening to the radio news, learns of the dangerous position of a diplomatic body that includes a former university lover of hers, besieged in the Balkans. This derives directly from Pym's recorded hearing that the Belgrade Legation to which Jay belonged was missing (noted in her diary, April 1941).

In 1972 Pym retired to live in Finstock village, Oxfordshire. In `So, some tempestuous morn', early in the decade, she reminiscently shows us a young girl in Oxford pining for unattainable undergraduates, embarking on flirtation. `The Christmas visit', written in 1977, deals with Christmas observances in the English countryside.

`Across a crowded room', written in 1979, records an actual visit to an Oxford College for an anniversary dinner, as her real-life escort there, portrayed as `George', in fact Edwin Ardener, told the Barbara Pym conference in Oxford in 1986.

(9 January 1993)

This substantial book contains the title novel, a well-done study of a taken-for-granted wife with increasingly clear sight and a perhaps inadvisable trip to Budapest; the autobiographically based what-if novel, “Gervase and Flora”, set in Finland and re-writing early

disappointment as created by the disappointed one, looking for a sort of closure; the unfinished “Home Front Novel”, with its detailed portrayal of a village in wartime; and the madcap spy novel, “So Very Secret”, which is competently plotted but surely both written and read for the characters; plus some pleasing short stories which look at old love revisited, show us Mark and Sophia Ainger and Faustina from “An Unsuitable Attachment” in later life, and are all very interesting; and an essay about developing her voice.

Slightly patchy on the whole, but we must remember that they were unpublished at Pym’s death, except for certain short stories, and they do, of course, give us more of Pym, which is what we all want, really, isn’t it!

An enjoyable collection of short fiction by Pym. Very witty but often there is a little bit of sadness underlying it, or maybe that is me?
I especially liked Adam, the husband in the novel the collection is named for. In a longer piece, he might have got a bit tiresome, so the length is perfect.
I

particularly like how there is very little conflict in these stories, things work out quite nicely in the end. This goes against lots of advice about what makes a good piece of fiction, but a writer as good as Pym can break the rules.

When Barbara Pym died in 1980 she left a considerable amount of unpublished material. This volume contains an early novel, CIVIL TO STRANGERS, three novellas and an autobiographical essay, 'Finding a Voice', Pym's only written commentary on her writing career.

In CIVIL TO STRANGERS the lives of a

young couple, Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon and her self-absorbed writer husband Adam, are thrown into upheaval when a mysterious Hungarian arrives in their village.

This a posthumous collection of one short novel or novella (the title piece, 170 pages in this edition) and some shorter pieces, introduced by Hazel Holt and copyrighted by Hilary Walton. Civil to Strangers is about Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon, one of Pym’s admirable women, and her selfish husband

Adam, who fancies himself a novelist and poet, though his books are known only to a few dozen people, and not many of them live in the Marsh-Gibbonses’ town of Up Callow. The novel recounts what happens when a stranger, a Hungarian named Stefan Tilos, moves into Up Callow, is infatuated with Cassandra, and is picked out as in need of a wife by Angela Gay, the niece of Mr. Gay, who during the course of the book makes a mutually comfortable marriage arrangement with a widow, Mrs. Gower. Meanwhile Kathleen Wilmot, who doesn’t think her husband the Reverend Rockingham Wilmot, rector at Up Callow, has accomplished as much as he should have, happily directs her older daughter Janie into the affection of the curate, Mr. Paladin, who got a first in theology and probably would accomplish much. Mr. Paladin is happy not only because Janie is attractive but because he is out of the clutches of the predatory Miss Gay, who had her eyes on him before Stefan Tilos came to town.
Cassandra decides to get away from her husband for a while, and sets out for Budapest. She discovers almost immediately, to her horror, that Tilos is also returning to Budapest, but she gives him the slip by attaching herself to some travelers from “a west country cathedral town.” Meanwhile Adam, in Oxford supposedly working at the Bodleian, so misses his wife that he suddenly decides to go to Budapest. There the Marsh-Gibbonses find Tilos and his family (including his new wife, to whom he had been engaged all along) very friendly, and they all return to Up Callow, including Uncle Ferenc, who might turn out to be a match for Miss Gay. The book ends with Cassandra telling Adam she’s pregnant.

I stopped before the 'Other Writings'. It seems to me that Pym's novels fall into two categories; they are either light-hearted and full of wry humour, or they are more cynical and almost snide. 'Civil to Strangers' falls firmly into the second category. Cassandra had no real personality and her

husband Adam was a pathetic man-child, whom she had decided to bestow all her money and devotion on for no discernible reason. Cassandra's Hungarian admirer was a totally unbelievable character. I did enjoy Mr Gay and Mrs Gower, but Miss Gay seemed to have been created solely to be mocked.

I have now read all of Pym's novels, and have enjoyed her writing, although in general more than I did in this case.

A volume I recommend only for hardcore enthusiasts, but useful for those interested in the development of a notable author.

Barbara Pym's oeuvre consists of twelve novels and a posthumous "autobiography" compiled from her diaries and letters. These are all satisfying, even if a couple of the works

which were initially rejected by publishers in the 1960s, only merited release because of her "comeback" in the late 1970s. Alongside this body of work, however, Pym's archives included half a dozen unpublished novels (some unfinished) and a few dozen short stories and miscellaneous pieces. The critical consensus is that many of the short stories are not worth public interest, written as they were during her youth or specifically for publication in "women's magazines" of the era - and rejected even by them! Here, Pym's literary executors cobble together a selection of the best material, which has become the final piece in the Pym puzzle.

Civil to Strangers and other Writings contains one complete novel, three novellas, four short stories, and an autobiographical radio talk. The eponymous novel was written when Pym was 23, and is a fairly perfunctory village romance about the wife of an arrogant, vague novelist, who attempts to return the spark to their marriage when a handsome Hungarian man moves into town. The novel feels very much like a draft, with moments of Pymian insight and observational humour, and the undertone of repressed sorrow that lurks around the corner of all of her works. Still, it is clear that the young, still very naive, Barbara was unable to properly imagine a marriage, and she is reduced more heavily here to stereotype. Additionally, most of the chapters have a surface-level quality; the artist has not yet added the detail and shading to the primary colours. Pym had such a distinctive narrative voice, but here we are seeing her influences rather than she herself.

The three additional novellas - all from the late 1930s - are excerpts of complete or near-complete works in the archive, polished by literary executor Hazel Holt. Pym was living in her childhood home in Shropshire, preparing the house for the imminent war, and wondering what she would do with her life. Each of these novels feels like an attempt to traverse a different path, before she found her ultimate style. Gervase and Flora is a harmless story about a young woman who follows her true love to Finland, where he has found a job and a beautiful Finnish lass; Home Front is a realist slice-of-life novel about an English village at the commencement of the War; and So Very Secret is a kind of spy novel, centered around an unexpected lead, a vicar's daughter, who discovers that a missing friend was involved in espionage, and sets out to find her.

All of these works are of great interest to the Pym scholar, as are the previously- unpublished short story So, Some Tempestuous Morn and a piece commissioned very late in Pym's life for the Church Times, called The Christmas Visit, both of which resurrect characters from the author's previous novels. However it is fair to say that all of them are examples of a writer-in-training, rather than a novel that would interest a newcomer or even an average fan. I will never complain about additional words by this author, but I think this volume's attractiveness was related to a kind of "Pymania" that took place during the 1980s, after the author's death.

More worthy, perhaps, are the other two short stories. Goodbye, Balkan Capital!, written during the War but never previously published, is another of the author's many reflections on unrequited love, and the way we turn past memories into fantasy, and it is really quite touching. Across a Crowded Room was one of the author's last pieces, commissioned by The New Yorker in the final year of her life, and is a neat example of her late style. Finally the short radio talk, Finding a Voice (1978), sees Barbara reflecting on her particular narrative style, and the problems this caused during the 1960s and early 1970s when no publisher would accept her novels.

A collection of historical interest, but perhaps not much more.