By Kohinoor Dasgupta
(originally published on September 13, 2011 in my blog Draupadiarjun)
TWO SINGLES cause dilemmas of attraction in An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym’s seventh novel, finished in 1963 when she was nearing a personal milestone, her fiftieth birthday.
Rupert Stonebird and Ianthe Broome are strangers in their mid-thirties who buy houses down the street from the vicarage where Mark and Sophia Ainger, also in their thirties, live with their cat Faustina. The setting is the North London parish of St. Basil’s where “the congregation tends to be a poor one and there are quite a number of coloured people”, mostly from the West Indies. Ianthe works at library; Stonebird teaches anthropology at London University. The newcomers have a horror of standing out but cannot avoid curiosity and categorization: Stonebird is generally perceived as a catch whereas Ianthe is sweetly on the shelf and a diligent parishioner.
The word "suitable” echoes through the book, thirty-odd times in my 256-page hardcover volume published by E.P. Dutton, New York in 1982. Many times it’s a ghostly whisper from Ianthe’s lawgiving mother: it follows Ianthe, for instance, into 28 Montgomery Square and makes her hurry past the turbaned Indian lodger though minutes ago she’d been tempted to tell her dressmaker that she was here visiting an Indian commercial traveler. Sometimes the word’s a cloud over Sophia’s wisdom. The characters are quite emphatic on questions on suitability. Topics as varied as occupations for men versus those for women, Adonaïs as bedtime reading in Rome, Faustina’s freedom with a palm cross, and haricot beans (as opposed to Vino Tinto) as nourishment for an old woman living alone in a bed-sit, all lend themselves to the suitability test in conversation and thoughts.
In Stonebird’s mind, the word surfaces in relation to Ianthe. From the beginning, Ianthe’s suitability as a blameless and tasteful adjunct in his life strikes him. Stonebird, for most of the book, appears as innocent of the emotion of love as Sophia’s robustly ill aunt, Bertha. Ianthe is a suitable girl, but she’s there, isn’t she, as fixed as her house with the mauve door, waiting on his decision to engage. (Besides, she looks tired and drab at the end of a workday.) Naturally he is out of humor at the type of ceremony that takes place at the end of the book. In contrast on the same occasion is the reaction of Mervyn Cantrell, Ianthe’s crabby supervisor. He was another man who had found the idea of Ianthe, with her charming house (and her Pembroke table and Hepplewhite chairs) extremely suitable. Cantrell’s reaction (did the sight of a finer Pembroke table at an antique shop have anything to do with it?), in retrospect, waters down both his attachment to the idea of Ianthe and his frequently frothing spite.
Stonebird has a strange effect on Sophia and on her twenty-five-year-old sister Penelope. Of all the women in the book, Sophia is the one he naturally gets along with, but decorum (suitability?) stands stolidly between easy conversation and a more particular interest. For a bright woman ,Sophia does make errors (the way she casts Ianthe in the mold of “splendid spinster”) but, even so, her certainty that Stonebird is the man for Penelope speaks more to her own involuntary liking for the anthropologist than to his being suitable for young Penny. Pym leaves us to draw our own conclusions about the natural kinship between Stonebird and Sophia, saying nothing.
Penelope, recovering from her latest misadventure with romantic love, is ready for the next one.
Pym’s voice in An Unsuitable Attachment is detached and deeply ironic. Now and then, she is as bland as Wodehouse and Wilde while reporting wildly comical exchanges that we know, from our own experiences, do take place quite normally.
After Ianthe’s confession, sitting by the marble lion licking its cub (amidst the cypresses, roses and apricot pansies near Villa Faustina in Ravello), Sophia says she felt Ianthe was “destined not to marry”. This exchange follows:
‘Ianthe was silent, as well she might be before this daunting description. Yet until lately she too had seen herself like this.
“What about your sister,” she said at last, “will she marry?”
“Oh Penny will marry,” said Sophia confidently, “she’s made for it. In fact,” she added, with a laugh, “I’ve arranged that she shall marry Rupert Stonebird.”
Ianthe looked surprised. “But she may not want to – or he may not. I don’t think one can – or should – arrange people’s lives for them like that.”
“No, you’re right – one shouldn’t. Do you know, I often ask myself, did I do wrong to deprive Faustina of the opportunity of motherhood? You know that she’d had the operation?”
Ianthe, lacking a sense of humor, feels indignant at this new evidence of Sophia’s habit of bringing Faustina into serious discussions. (She doesn’t know that while she was wishing at Trevi fountain that she might return to Rome with the man she loved, Sophia had privately said “a prayer that Faustina might be safe and happy”.) People are constantly coming up short in each other’s suitability meters!
Sophia is one of my favorite Pym characters, sometimes the saddest and most insightful person in this book, sometimes appearing silly and peculiar by following a train of thought aloud when there’s no way for people do not know her well to follow the tenuous connections, and she is, sometimes, downright blind. With her fading titian hair and tall, thin body, her fascination with the exotic, the awful errors she makes, both of eye and judgment, her awareness of life’s extravagant and vast and mysterious and myriad appeals to the human heart, and her meager, suitably downsized existence as a clergyman’s childless wife, she’s both courageous and vulnerable. I have never liked Stonebird better than when he reveals his understanding of Sophia: “I feel Sophia knows about life … I think she sometimes feels that there really is neither joy nor love nor light…” Oh Sophia. Who quotes from Reginald Heber’s complacent missionary hymn ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’ (“It’s the hymns that are the great stumbling block [to attending church],” our old friend Everard Bone - from Excellent Women - says elsewhere in the book) to an uncomprehending Ianthe; who remembers a mosque at Woking; who questions why Mark assumes that Ianthe’s uncle would be a suitable preacher without knowing the man at all, and who muses: "God is content with little but sometimes we have so little that it is hardly worth the offering.”
Pym’s irony asks of us that we examine her web of mindsets dominated by notions of suitability. She encourages us to look again at things and people and feelings we exclude from our lives. The character of John Challow personifies this kind of review. The day he meets the cool and well-bred Ianthe, who obviously is quite a few years older to him, and before he knows anything about her house or other possessions, he quotes Tennyson’s Danae lines to her. Pym keeps John distant from us - after all, even Ianthe hardly knows him. (One would have thought his exotic appeal - sensational looks combined with lack of information - would gladden Sophia – in an academic way - but she’s shaken by what he stands for. Is she afraid that John will break Ianthe’s heart or is she fearful that the newlyweds in the parish will bring new reminders of meagerness in her own life?) Ianthe, surprisingly, runs beyond the reach of her mother’s warnings about unsuitable boys.
For people not familiar with Pym, here’s why a book she finished in 1963 was published posthumously in 1982: it was turned down by her publisher, causing her so much grief that she did not write for years.
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