When her letters and diaries were published last year, some of Barbara Pym’s admirers must have been shocked by the contrast between the sexless, and on the whole rather muted heroines of her novels, and the raw unhappy passions of Miss Pym herself, when in love. The memorable thing about the diaries, however, is the extent to which they chronicle the emergence and coherence of her art. More than any post-war English novelist, she has created an immediately recognisable world. It is recognisable not merely because it is a place – very English, with rather worse weather than one would have hoped, and less nice houses or flats than one remembers. It is also recognisable for its mood and its ethos. ‘Rather Crampton Hodnet was how she put it to herself.

Barbara Pym wrote this novel in the first year of the war. From the editor’s preface it would not seem as though many publishers rejected it, like her later works. She apparently laid it aside and decided herself not to publish it. Its nominal setting is North Oxford. Crampton Hodnet is merely the Oxfordshire village of which one of the more minor characters is the vicar. But it is entirely appropriate that the novel should have this title, since it emphasises how strongly the Pym world was finished and fashioned from the outset of her career. There is no more feeling of Oxford in this book than there is of London in Excellent Women. The very grotesquerie of the words Crampton Hod-net mark out the territory for us, territory inhabited by bad-tempered librarians, gossipy old ladies, drippy curates, anabsent-minded professors; a world where very little happens, and where what does happen can be related to quotations from the English poets, or smiled out of exist-ence. It is above all a world where passion cannot be coped with, where extremes cannot be absorbed. The coming of Spring itself gets quietly patted down, and put in its place.

Spring came early that year, and the sun was so bright that it made all the North Oxford residents feel as shabby as the still leafless trees, so that they hurried to Elliston’s, Webber’s and Badcock’s, intending to buy jumper suits and spring tweeds in bright, flower-like colours to match the sudden impulse which had sent them there. But when they found themselves in the familiar atmosphere of the shop, they forgot the sun shining outside and the thrilling little breezes that made everyone want to be in love, and the young lady assistant forgot them too, because, although she may have felt them walking down the Botley Road with her young man on Sunday after-noon, they were not the kind of things one thought about in business hours. And so, after a quick, practised glance at the customer, out would come the old fawn, mud, navy, dark brown, slate and clerical greys, all the colours they always had before, and without which they would hardly have felt themselves. It would probably be raining tomorrow, and grey, fawn or bottle green, were suitable for all weathers, whereas daffodil yellow, leaf green, hyacinth blue or coral pink would look unsuitable and show the dirt.

The charm of Crampton Hodnet for our generation is that we have all, as it were, been wearing daffodil yellow and coral pink since the Sixties, so that it seems most refreshing to come across drab greys and browns in art. Barbara Pym’s own life at this period was pinks and yellows, but in her art she chose to draw grey.

The ironies and revenges of Crampton Hodnet are exemplified in the two interwoven plots of the novel. On the one hand, a middle-aged don called Francis Cleveland, with an almost grown-up daughter and a boring wife called Margaret, falls in love with his pupil. She is a beautiful girl with dark passionate eyes who happens to be called Barbara. The opening stages of their tentative love affair are touchingly well-described: pathetic little walks in the Botanic Gardens, a visit sneaked to the British Museum; a declaration of love in the reading room, followed by tea at Lyon’s corner house where neither have the appetite for a Beano (baked beans with poached egg). And, needless to say all this is witnessed by gossips, and gets back to his wife, and the marriage is threatened. Francis and Barbara go punting, fall in the river, and they make desultory attempts at love. They decide to go away together and have a holiday in Paris. But from that point, everything goes wrong. The weather is bad. They miss the boat going to Dover. Barbara never seems to enjoy sex much and when they get to the hotel at Dover, she does a bunk while Francis is in the bath. He returns to the bosom of his family with a frightful chill, and his wife enjoys cosseting him and not letting him speak while he has a thermometer stuck in his mouth. Crampton Hodnet is triumphant.

But in its very citadel, Leamington Lodge, there are some comic reversals. This is the house occupied by Miss Doggett and her plain young companion Miss Morrow, whom we know from Jane and Prudence. Miss Doggett takes in an idiotic lodger called Mr Latimer. Needless to say, he is a clergyman, and needless to say he proposes to Miss Morrow, but in so half-hearted a manner that she turns him down. They get rather tipsy on sherry, which makes them think inappropriate thoughts about beakers full of the warm south, but they seem as passionless as any occupant of the Pym world. Mr Latimer is also taking his holidays in Paris, and Miss Doggett insists that he should seek out a small private hotel where only English is spoken, and where he can be sure to be given Sanatogen and Ovaltine. But in fact he returns with a pretty girlfriend of nineteen called Pamela with whom he has fallen passionately in love. So Crampton Hodnet does not always win the day.

I suppose that, crudely speaking, Barbara Bird is the passionate, sexual side of Miss Pym’s nature and Miss Morrow is (by fairly obvious name-association) the person she was sure to become. But neither of them like sex much, or even the idea of it. Barbara quotes Abraham Cow-ley (she would):

Indeed, I must confess
When Souls mix ‘tis an happiness
But not complete till bodies too do join.

‘Well, of course, she admitted reluctantly, one naturally wanted one’s love to be complete, although it was her private opinion that hers could hardly be more complete than it already was’. Strangely enough this ‘completion’ is almost unknown in the entire Pym oeuvre. Jane Austen, with whom she is often com-pared, concludes each of her books with the satisfying sense that at least one pair of lovers has been happily matched. More than once one would echo Francis Cleveland’s judgment. ‘Barbara … an attractive girl with dark, passionate eyes, but a cold fish, oh, definitely, a cold fish’.

The cold fishery is a distinct limitation, if one is considering Barbara Pym as a writer to be compared with the great novelists. She lacks largeness, not merely of scale, but of heart. But as a comedian, the limitation is a distinct advantage. She is not, of course, funny in the way that Dickens could be funny, or as P G Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh were funny. The editor of this novel says that she and several other readers of the book have laughed aloud over Crampton Hodnet. I do not expect many other readers will do so. The pleasure is quieter. There will be many delicious smiles. And, as always in the Pym world, one smiles without quite knowing whether the humour is purely intentional. There is something so doggedly trivial about her. For instance, the wronged wife, contemplating the idea that she should take steps concerning her husband’s infidelity thinks: ‘They talked so glibly about divorce and remarriage, as if it were nothing more complicated than mincing up the cold beef and making it into a shepherd’s pie’. An image which is entirely meaningless, but which brings before the reader the whole extraordinary Pym world.

Marriage, and the relations between the sexes are in fact handled in her novels with relentless glibness, which is what makes them so popular. There are few novelists who take men less seriously, and who imply with more wistful decisiveness that it is possible to get by without them. They crop up, of course, as librarians dominated by their mothers, as professors with dithering or nagging wives, as curates who need a hot water-bottle even on the feast of St Simon and St Jude. But in Crampton Hodnet they are emasculated

There are many rich period details in the book which the reader will savour. Bedside lamps are thought a luxury. Spaghetti comes out of a tin. Gooseberries are carried in enamel bowls. The Daily Mirror is read by dons’ wives. Young dandies wear ‘suede shoes, pin-stripe flannels, teddy-bear coats and check caps’ and every motor journey starts with oil on the fingers before pressing the self-starter. There are old men alive who were up at Oxford in the 1880s. A female undergraduate’s room contains a folding washstand and there are stockings drying over the back of a chair. Sir Oswald Mosley is spoken of in the same breath as Napoleon, while in the corner of Lyon’s Corner House the orchestra is playing a rumba.

Happy days. Even if Crampton Hodnet is not the best novel she ever wrote, we will doubtless all buy two copies – one for our friends, and one to keep. Students of Private Eye, moreover, will be interested to read this quotation from The Times, which occurs on page 172: ‘The Earl and Countess of Gnome have returned to London from New York’.