Some Tame Gazelle | Barbara Pym #ComfortRead

A number of years ago, I read a few Barbara Pym books. I enjoyed them so much I decided to go back and read her books in chronological order. Some Tame Gazelle (1950), her first published novel, has been waiting patiently on my shelf for nearly 7 years now. It took a pandemic to give me the time as well as the desire to embrace another Pym comfort read!

One of the elements in Some Tame Gazelle that appealed to me was knowing that she wrote the book imagining what she and her sister, Hilary, might be like thirty years older. Naturally this made me curious to know a little bit more about Pym and her sister.

Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born on the 2nd June 1913 and died on the 11th of January 1980.

She was the eldest daughter of a Shropshire couple who encouraged her creative efforts from a young age. Hilary was born in 1916.

During WWII, Pym served in the Women's Royal Navy Service. In 1944 she was posted to Naples for the duration of the war. When she returned to London, she moved into a Pimlico flat with her sister, who was recovering from a broken marriage. Pym had her own share of romantic affairs, but none of them stuck.

She wrote social comedies featuring unmarried women living alone in a community of clergymen and college types. Mavis Cheek wrote the Introduction in my copy of Some Tame Gazelle and claimed that 'as with all the best writers of comedy, she is non-judgemental and, though beady-eyed, she is also sympathetic, particularly in matters of the heart and how foolishly they can make us act.' I suspect her sympathy may have came from hard-won personal experience.

Pym was a popular post-war writer until her work went out of favour in the more modern times of the 1960's. In 1977 however, everything changed, when she was nominated as the most under-rated writer of the century by Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin.

She is buried beside her sister (Hilary died in 2004) in a cemetery in Finstock, Oxfordshire.

Some Tame Gazelle was written in 1935 and features two fifty-something women living quietly in a small English village, where the goings-on in their local Anglican church absorb all their attention. One sister becomes ridiculously attached to each new young curate assigned to their parish; while the other carries a torch for the Archdeacon, her once upon a time beau, now married to another - the rather odious, Agatha. One spends her time berating herself for thinking unkind thoughts about Agatha; the other is busy knitting vests and scarves for the latest curate.

It's all very charming and rather sweet. There's a suffusing warmth and tenderness that I don't remember from her other books. Certainly, a few days in the company of Belinda and Harriet Bede, was the perfect antidote to the Covid-19 lockdown blues.

If you love Angela Thirkell or E. M. Delafield, then Pym is the gal for you too!

Excellent Women

An Academic Question
Jane and Prudence

A Maigret Christmas by Georges Simenon

A Maigret Christmas contains three very different stories by Georges Simenon - A Maigret Christmas, Seven Small Crosses in a Notebook and The Restaurant near Place des Ternes - yet they all share a similar sense of melancholy and loneliness.

In Simenon's world, Christmas is not a time for goodwill and cheer, so seasonally well-adjusted readers beware! Instead, in these three stories, we visit long, cold night shifts, suicides and lonely prostitutes. The title story (first published in 1950) is the only one that features Maigret though. The other two are set in his world, his time and his place and provide an interesting backstory or subtext to his other stories.

The descriptions of Christmas Eve in all three were evocative of the season, but the paragraph that has stuck with me is the image of the two Maigret's carefully avoiding a certain topic all day,

He didn't feel depressed exactly. It was just that his dream - which he still could not remember - had left him with raw nerves. And anyway maybe it wasn't the dream but Christmas itself. He was going to have to tread carefully all day, weigh his words, just as Madame Maigret had calibrated her movements as she got out of bed, for she too would be a little more prickly than usual...But enough of that! Don't even think about it! Don't say a word that might bring up that subject. And later on, don't look out on to the street too often when the kids came out of doors and started showing off their toys.

If you love Maigret and his ever patient wife, then this little titbit about their personal circumstances will break your heart. That this particular case involves a young girl, who by the end, will be in need of care and guardianship for a while, is a bittersweet outcome, that sees Maigret saying to Madame Maigret,

"Not ours to keep, no. Just on loan. I thought it would be better than nothing and that you'd be happy."

Seven Small Crosses was first published in 1951 and first translated into English in 1976. It features Lecoeur, one of the night shift 'owls' manning the police control room, taking emergency calls and patching through information to all the stations around Paris.

Lecoeur is hard-working, dedicated and very meticulous. These days he may even be diagnosed with high-functioning autism. A late-night strange set of incidents begins to take on a sinister and very personal meaning when he realises that his young nephew may have witnessed a murder and is on the run. Normally police procedural stories leave me cold, but the personal elements in this one, that were revealed gradually, created a great deal of tension and suspense.

The final, very short story (also referred to as A Christmas Story For Grown-Ups) begins with a suicide and ends with a drunken brawl between a prostitute and a young women attempting to get on the game. The older cynical prostitute guesses what is happening when she witnesses two men slowing getting the young ingenue drunker and drunker in a bar. She intervenes, even though she's not quite sure why. Perhaps it's because they come from the same small village outside Paris? Or perhaps it's because everyone should 'want to be Father Christmas' just once in their life.

'Just imagine if, once in their lives, everybody behaved like Father Christmas...Just imagine it, right?...Just once...And when you think of how many people there are on this earth...'

Yes, just imagine.