Jumble

An Excellent Woman in her natural habitat, at a jumble sale

With fall coming on - the trees in the landscape beyond our little terrace are turning, and the mornings are increasingly chilly when I go to walk the dogs - my thoughts as usual turn to things cozy and familiar.  As a result, I am rereading Excellent Women.

A Fond Return

Bonus points to the clever Gentle Readers who know for 

what poem this charming illo was originally intended...

So it seems I'm getting better.  I won't say it's all been roses, but from the beginning one is told over and over again that every day brings a little improvement, and on the whole that's proving true.  The mental and physical fog that follows the sort of things I've been through is lifting, and my convalescence, as of this week, is heading in new directions.

Birthday Girl: An Excellent Woman

Barbara Pym would have been 101 today; in a better world, she would be - although given her abiding faith in (or at least fascination with) the Church (in its middle-high Anglo-Catholic form particularly), perhaps she is.  And for her birthday, this treat.

Table for One

Todd Horne, Table for One

Something there is about traveling alone that recalls, inevitably, Barbara Pym. One feels self conscious, a need to be perhaps that little bit tidier, quieter, less obtrusive. Like her hypersensitive gentlewomen, one seeks a quiet table to the side, waits for more obstreperous parties at the checkout, watches the world with a mix of amusement and foreboding.

It has been a year since I've been back in the U.S., and on my first day out, jetlagged, exhausted, and rather disoriented, it seemed a very foreign place indeed - one full of large, loud, and alarmingly capable people, all going somewhere rather faster than expected. There are - and this is a very good thing - a great many dogs out and about, doted over and noted approvingly by passers by. It is cold, comparatively, but crisp, and after a block or two I realize how out of touch with urban walking I am - the necessary rhythms, the numbers of distractions, even the mechanics of crossing the street. It feels, I think, a fraction of what it might for a longtime invalid to go for a first tentative walk after weeks or months of being housebound.

I wandered about for a while, appreciating any number of things - a used book store full of richness, a farmer's market heaped with unimaginable treasure - even as others tended, it must be admitted, to appal: the clothing, which seems quite purposely atrocious, as if people stood in front of their mirrors muttering appreciatively, "yes, indeed, that does make me look cheap, fat, and slovenly!"; the noise, unfettered and inescapable; and the sheer muchness of it all. It makes me realize how restful on the eyes the monotonous landscapes of the Sultanate (white villas, dusty hills, sea) must be.

I finally found a quiet, eccentric little café, recommended by the used-book store's bemused proprietor on the basis of being "reliable and not a chain, with a decent breakfast" and settled in. It was all that had been promised and more, with people hunched over their laptops taking advantage of free wifi, a little quiet Classical burbling in the background, and a very respectable plate of eggs and ham on offer, delivered by the waiter/cook/manager/man of all work, who looked to be Central Casting bohemian, lank black ponytail and large silver earring.

He later came to top up the coffee. "I'm so glad you're here," he confided, stopping, hand on hip with the coffee pot in the other. I suppose I looked surprised, a stout middle-aged party in boatshoes and buttondown, Trollope novel in hand, not being the demographic I would have thought this particular café was seeking. "Oh, you see," he said, "we've had a lot of negative energy in here this morning, and I can see you're not like that."

"You're positive energy," he added, looking thoughtful for a moment, before passing on. Well, thought I, I suppose, as a lone traveler far from home, that's something.

I wish I could report that with that good portent in hand I made something terribly useful and fulfilling of the rest of the day, but no. Instead, I returned to my hotel - an imposingly chic assemblage of what is described as "Early American-influenced minimalism" - and collapsed into one of those inadvised jetlag daytime sleeps. Now it's the middle of the night and I probably won't sleep 'til dawn. Knowing me, I shall endeavor to be positive even about that.

Just as, I'm sure, Ianthe Broome, Mildred Lathbury, or Miss Pym herself would do.

Have You Met Miss Pym?

In Britain's dim, gray times after the War, when it seemed like rationing would never end and Empire was slipping inexorably away, a sharp-eyed young writer looked around at all that was cosy and middle-class and obliviously headed for, well, oblivion, and carefully dissected it: vicars and their long suffering wives, suburban church festivals, muddled anthropologists, and, especially, well-raised single ladies who were slowly realizing that, if they weren't careful, they would end up beneficiaries of the very charities for which they were now volunteering.

Barbara Pym was, in many ways, very like some of her characters: a tall, slightly gawky, thoughtful woman with an interest in food and what the neighbors (neighbours?) were up to. Knowing that she had her own blighted romances, earned an exiguous income editing a learned journal, and lived in a quiet district with her sister and the inevitable cats, one runs the risk of mistaking her for one of them: the somewhat neurasthenic Ianthe Broome of An Unsuitable Attachment, perhaps, or Excellent Women's lightly acerbic Mildred Lathbury (no fear, tho', of confusing her with the vile Allegra Gray!). This gives an unnerving effect to reading her published diaries - as if they were, somehow, an extension of the canon of her novels.

She had a mild vogue in the 1950s; then, a rejection letter from a publisher, and almost 15 years of silence. A brief renaissance after a mid-70s rediscovery was cut short by her death, but we are left with the books - simultaneously vivid and infinitely occupied with the minutiae of life, wry, funny, and often, especially at second reading, terribly sad - or, rather, melancholy.

They make, as another summer fades, lovely reading in autumn, I must say. And now I must run - Lady Finstock will be ringing in later this morning for tea and to pick up my last season's things for the Harvest Festival jumble sale...