Blue Velvet Crampton Hodnet

By Martha Duffy

Barbara Pym was the Cinderella of the previous literary decade. Having achieved a minor reputation in England during the '50s, she could not find a publisher in the '60s when London took to swinging. All that changed in 1977, three years before her death, when the Times Literary Supplement ran a feature on neglected writers. Philip Larkin and David Cecil, both authors of mighty clout, independently singled out Pym. Overnight, it seemed, her books were not only available but on the best-seller lists, and she had the kind of loyal following that usually requires years to build.

The secret, as readers quickly learned, was Pym's reliability. She offered a narrow world, not sentimentalized, but comfortable in its coherence. Characters slipped along easily from book to book, much as they do in the vaster schemes of Trollope. In Crampton Hodnet (written around 1940 but prepared for publication only now by Pym's literary executor), one comes upon two old friends from Jane and Prudence (1953), tyrannical old Miss Doggett and her younger paid companion, the self-effacing Miss Morrow. Their props and surroundings are familiar too: the excellent women "full of good sense," the pampered Anglican priests, the warmth of a musquash coat, the bedtime balm of Ovaltine, the ultimate taste test -- does one take China tea or Indian?

But some things are altered. In Jane and Prudence, the ladies live, appropriately, in an anonymous village. In this book Pym places them a bit awkwardly in the academic setting of Oxford, where she herself was educated. Miss Doggett is about the same, a tactless, sanctimonious bully robed in purple and decorated with bespoke hats. The feather-light Crampton Hodnet is about three brief romances, two of which Miss Doggett tries to meddle with and one that she misses completely, although it involves her companion and the curate who boards with her.

Miss Morrow, however, is different. In Jane and Prudence, she is a masterly drawn comic portrait: a coolly calculating woman who hides her ambition behind the lowered lids of humble gentility. In this book she seems the same at first, a wan little mouse who acquires sexual power when she puts on a blue velvet dress. But this Miss Morrow is gentle and vulnerable, a creature whose only asset is her sense of decency. Jane and Prudence shows a novelist in complete command, but the rare charm of Crampton Hodnet is in the glimpse it offers of Pym's imagination as it pauses for a moment in perfect understanding of a character. That sympathy stretches beyond the horizon of comedy.