Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings
Published in my blog Draupadiarjun on June 21, 2010
WE MISTAKE thirty-somethings to be an invention of the 1990s. But that time of life was every bit as distinctive and unsettling in the 1950s, if you ask Barbara Pym.
Have you read A Glass of Blessings by Pym? The 256-page novel was published in 1958 by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London.
Wilmet and Rodney, Rowena and Harry, Piers Longridge, Father Ransome, Mary Beamish and Wilfred Bason form a swatch of thirty-somethings in Pym’s novel. It may be argued that the thirties felt somewhat older in the late 1950s than they do in 2010, but all the rest of it, the longings, the endings, and the beginnings, are timeless.
Begin reading a Barbara Pym and immediately you are in a place so ordinary that you begin also wondering despondently what the art will ever derive from. It takes a bit to realise that you are in the total and inescapable embrace of the art already. From the dreary interiors of the clergy house, lit up by the temptations of Father Thames’ objets d’art, to the (description of) Piers’ bedroom as it used to be, from Sybil’s well-appointed mansion (with the lined curtains) to the "antique shop in Devon that does teas…”, from the choir vestry of Father Ransome’s suburban church, on the walls of which fungus is joyfully discovered, to the bottom of the garden at the retreat house, from the talked-of Cenerentola villa in Siena to the visited Cenerentola coffee bar where the thirty-somethings feel old, the novel illuminates the interiors of human haunts and habitations, real and imagined, seen and unseen, in ways that are a striking achievement in writing.
Then there is the wonderful supporting cast of clergymen (all trying in their own ways to draw attention to the Glass of Blessings) and the old or elderly: Mary’s mother and Wilmet’s mother-in-law; Professor Root (who at sixty-seven sends roses, when Rodney and Piers do not – why not?); Mrs. Greenhill, Miss Prideaux and Sir Denbigh Grote. The question of age is brought into play again and again though the thirty-somethings typically are not yet conscious of aging. They judge the old, and are conscious of the finiteness of youthful aspirations, but the aspic of aging is yet to be tasted.
The story is Wilmet’s, told in first person, hiding nothing except what Wilmet fails to see. The Glass of Blessings is made of glass, and for better or for worse, we see in it what we do. It may not be such an awful deal after all, because how else could a furniture depository loom up round a bend like a Turkish palace?
Barbara Pym passed away on July 11, 1980, at age sixty-seven, but her artistic embrace endures. Among her other books are Jane and Prudence (1953) and Quartet in Autumn which (rejected writers take heart!) was finally published in 1977 after several rejections.
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