This is by Barbara Pym (1913-80), who re-entered my universe recently when I read Laura Miller's comparison of Pym's style with Kate Atkinson's in Transcription, and then realized that Finstock, the village where Pym is buried, lay pretty much directly on our route from Newtown Common to Hadzor.



My previous Pym experience consisted of A Glass of Blessings and Excellent Women, which I read around the mid-1980s. I liked both, but I wasn't so keen on An Academic Question when I listened to it in 1992. I was wondering which one would work best as a way of renewing my acquaintance, and then Henry Eliot -- I love Henry Eliot -- suggested Quartet in Autumn as one of his seasonal classics.


Pym loved cats. This is Minerva

Quartet in Autumn was published in 1977; it's the last-but-one novel to be published in her lifetime; and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Set in the 1970s, it follows the paths of four 60-something people: Edwin, Norman, Marcia, and Letty. The firm they work for is unnamed, but they all work in the same office, doing some unspecified and uninspiring job.

They're all single, our protagonists, and they all live alone.

Edwin was married, but his wife is now dead ("now he had all the freedom that loneliness brings"). He's probably the most sociable of the bunch. He's a churchy person, and something of a busybody. Although he's markedly conservative, his heart is in the right place.

Norman is a tougher nut, "an angry little man" with a fund of depressing stories, and a tendency to racism.

Letty is the most philosophical of the quartet. She thinks, and she wonders. "It was a comfortable life [in lodgings]," she muses at one point, "if a little sterile, perhaps even deprived. But deprivation implied once having had something to be deprived of... and Letty had never really had anything much. Yet, she sometimes wondered, might not the experience of 'not having' be regarded as something with its own validity?" She's the one most likely to articulate her thoughts on the passing of time: "All gone, that time, those people... Letty woke up and lay for some time meditating on the strangeness of life, slipping away like this."

Marcia is the oddest, and becomes odder and sadder as the story progresses. She still lives in the house where she used to look after her mother, now dead, and she has recently undergone a mastectomy. She's somewhat preoccupied with Mr Strong, her surgeon (whom she stalks in a mild kind of way), and seems to enjoy giving Janice Brabner (some kind of social worker) a hard time for trying to be helpful. She's increasingly oblivious of personal appearance or good housekeeping, obsessively collects milk bottles, and secretes unwanted items onto the shelves of the library.


Finstock, 2024

The women's retirement is a gear-change in the novel, and subtly delineates essentially gendered concerns: "Their status as ageing unskilled women did not entitle them to an evening party, but it was felt that a lunchtime gathering... would be entirely appropriate." They have done "'women's work', the kind of thing that could easily be replaced by a computer". And indeed, they have no successors... "It gave [Letty] the feeling that she and Marcia had been swept away as if they had never been."

People speculate about what their future lives will hold. About Marcia: "It was difficult to imagine what her retirement would be like -- impossible and rather gruesome to speculate on it." About Letty: "She had already been classified as a typical English spinster about to retire to a cottage in the country, where she would be joining with others like her to engage in church activities, attending meetings of the Women's Institute, and doing gardening and needlework." (Letty's planned move to the country to live with a widowed friend is thrown into disarray when said friend decides to marry a clergyman 20 years her junior. This subplot, told in mostly comedic vein, is one of the lighter elements of the story.)

Marcia insists to Janice Brabner: "A woman can always find plenty to occupy her time... I have my house to see to." But, of course, Marcia actually does very little in the way of "seeing to" her house... Letty plans to read, and wants to tackle sociology. But she's disappointed. She had expected to be engrossed, "not frozen with boredom, baffled and bogged down by incomprehensible jargon". Nevertheless, she tries not to let slip any indication that post-work time is hanging heavy on her hands.



All four characters suffer from loneliness, but the women seem to have the most difficult experience, possibly because they're more aware of it. Both Marcia and Letty have the occasional suicidal thought. Marcia wonders why there's no sign on plastic bags warning people to keep them from elderly people "who might well have an irrestible urge to suffocate themselves". Letty looks at the wood near Marjorie's house, "wondering if it could be the kind of place to lie down in and prepare for death when life became too much to be endured".

And Marcia's is the most tragic denouement. Malnourished, she is found collapsed in her home. She is taken to hospital, but later dies there. Very tellingly, we have this reaction from her fellow-retiree: "Letty was overcome by a sense of desolation, as if by Marcia's death she was now completely alone. And it wasn't even as if they had been close friends."

This is a key theme, and though it is entirely fair to say that this is a rather dark novel, we never tip right over into utter bleakness -- precisely because of this fine thread of something resembling friendship. Our protagonists don't visit each other. They're all reluctant socializers, reticent, unwilling to commit, unwilling to appear vulnerable, resentful of offers of help. ("It was dreadful, Marcia felt, the way so many people wanted to know one's business and, when she did not respond, to tell one about their own." Letty, meanwhile, ponders: "It wasn't really as if she minded being alone [for Christmas] for she was used to it; it was rather the idea that people might find out that she had no invitation for the day and that they would pity her.")

But there is SOMETHING in the relationship connecting the four of them... Patrick Reardon describes this tenuous thing very well:

"Quartet in Autumn is very much about coping. It’s about coping in a messy way, the way that most of us cope with life -- with indecision, with stabs in the dark and with more than a little confusion. It is also about the thin but strong bonds that unite people in ways that aren’t always recognized, bonds of little-realized significance, bonds of what might easily -- and rightly -- be called love... I’m pretty sure that nowhere in Quartet in Autumn does any one of the four refer to any of the others as a friend. Yet, in the curious alchemy of human nature, they are friends. And they do what friends do. And they feel for each other as friends, as fellow travelers in the long haul that is called life."

So, when Letty's landlady, early in the narrative, sells out to a Nigerian preacher who conducts loud and boisterous services, Edwin helps his colleague find lodgings somewhere quieter. Letty tries to reach out to Marcia with small gestures. Marcia and Norman share a big tin of coffee, ostensibly because it's cheaper that way, but with a connection that goes just a tad deeper than economics. Marcia and Norman have no social connection, but she leaves her house to him, enabling him to contemplate a release from bedsit-land.

The book ends with the remaining three heading for the country to have lunch with Marjorie (whose engagement has foundered). Such an expedition seems a strange idea, thinks Letty. "But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change."



***

Ironically, perhaps, for such a bittersweet, autumn-of-life novel, it proved to be Pym's renaissance. Her career was a curious one: "Between 1950 and 1961, she had published six generally well-received novels -- and, then, nothing. She couldn’t get a publisher to consider her work again until she was nominated by both literary critic Lord David Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin as the most under-rated writer of the century. That opened the door again, and Quartet in Autumn would, she hoped, be her comeback novel. It was, many critics agree, her masterpiece."

You wonder how much of Pym is in it... Like Letty, she too had missed out on married love, for various reasons; like Marcia, she went through treatment for breast cancer. This reviewer wonders whether "Pym is showing us how things might have worked out for her too", if those votes of confidence had not come through in 1975.

All in all, a thought-provoking book. You always hope you'll do things better. You always fear, if you were dropped into the solitude of these folks, that you would struggle to do even as well as they have.