By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(Review of Quartet in Autumn, originally published on September 16, 2010 in my blog draupadiarjun)
Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn was published in 1977, after no work of hers was accepted for publication for sixteen years. The reception to Quartet was enthusiastic. The author died of breast cancer in 1980.
Thirty-three years after the book was published, it comes across to me as a somber work, where Pym’s voice is strong but sad. At the heart of it is Marcia Ivory who is steadily losing her mind during the months following a mastectomy.
Around Marcia all day till she retired were her coworkers, Norman, Edwin and Letty, the two men also on the verge of retirement, and Letty the same age as Marcia. Norman, Edwin and Letty, in their own ways, are more active people than Marcia. Norman’s constant irritation with the world relieves for him the monotony of his trivial pursuits. Edwin busily makes the round of churches in London, and Letty takes an interest in her appearance and faces her bleak prospects bravely. Even so, the energy of the book derives from the peculiar and fierce Marcia and her secret obsessions. Marcia’s "case” gives us social worker Janice, and also Priscilla, the neighbor across Marcia’s untended garden. An unwritten story dies with Marcia, even her departure stirring life in the other main characters.
The 1970s must have been an especially terrible time to grow old in, after the youth-worship that began in the mid-1960s. For many people born before World War I, whom 1945 found in their mid-thirties, life had stolen away much and given an awareness of aging and an unshakeable drabness in return. When the Flower Power generation arrived beating the drums of youth and love, many lonely, elderly people must have felt marginalized. It is the sort of feeling that Letty gets when she visits the office after retirement – "as if they had never existed”:
“Looking around the room, her eyes lighted on a spider plant which she had brought one day and not bothered to take away when she left. It had proliferated; many little offshoots were now hanging down until they dangled over the radiator. Was there some significance in this, a proof that she had once existed, that the memory of her lingered on?”
There is no proof that any member of the quartet had heard of Eleanor Rigby or Father McKenzie. Had they done, perhaps they would have felt less threatened by the young and healthy.
Neither does suspicion of the young bind the quartet in fellow-feeling or friendship. Human beings do not find each other interesting or attractive just because they spend eight hours in the same space on every work day. Small kindnesses must be noticed and reciprocated. A need for friendship must be felt, and some virtue or interest has to be looked for tenaciously in one another. Only Letty makes a few overtures to Marcia during the latter’s post-surgery months at work. Of course, she is rebuffed. It is too late. Everyone in the little room has made up his or her mind about the others long ago.
Pym’s smile does light up the odd page – Mrs. Pope "fiercely scraping a piece of burnt toast”, the business of Letty’s milk bottle, and David Lydell, of course. Overall, though, the mood is grim, and the inadequacies of impulses to communicate, heartbreaking. What sort of happiness was Marcia’s, living, as she did finally, for the elusive Mr. Strong’s platitudes? What kind of gratitude was Norman’s, fighting inchoate guilt, but finding nothing to remember but the general, oft-repeated assumptions about Marcia?
At the end, with a certain heaviness of hand rarely caught in Pym, the story’s wan face is pointed to the sun. A rare and unforgettable book.
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