Savouring Pym's Number Two

Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym (Macmillan, £8.95).
DEAR BARBARA Pym has given so much pleasure with her gentle stories of Anglican curates, spinster ladies and "feeble inefficient" men, that the post-humorous publicaiton of her second novel (circa 1940) is an unexpected bonus.
The Crampton Hodnet of the title is a non-existent village invented on the spur of the moment by Mr Latimer, the archetypal curate, fearful of the scandal which might arise from his walk in the rain with Miss Doggett, lady-companion and realist.
She is utterly shocked to hear a clergyman telling a deliberate lie and "Crampton Hodnet" becomes for her a symbol of the evasions and deceptions practised by her tyrannical and snobbish employer and her nephew, lecturer, Francis Cleveland, not to mention a handful of slippery minor characters.
Francis Cleveland's happy, if banal, marriage is hilariously threatened by his attempts at an affair with Barbara, one of his students, a pleasant poetic girl anxious for platonic love.
Miss Doggett is a determined spinster, enjoying her observer's role, her comfortable religion "this was the Church of England, a collection of old women, widows and spinsters and one young man not quite right in the head" — and even her dowdiness since "one could be a nature-worshipper without spoiling one's dress".
This stoical tongue-in-cheek spinster reappears time after time in Miss Pym's novels. The author her self was unmarried, but her recently published autobiography in the form of letters and diaries reveals that she was quite a "goer" in the field of romantic liasions and a surprisingly pluralist personality. She was not by any means on the side-lines with her knitting, church-bazaars and curatefancying. The sadness of her later novels perhaps reflects her disappointments in love and, for a while, literary acclaim, but this early novel, edited by her friend Hazel Holt, is full of fun and exuberance.
The setting in North Oxford is described with a pre-Bctjeman horror of Victoriana. There is a general disillusion with men, all of whom in this novel are unsatisfactory in one way or another. Women are either victims or tormentors: there is an element of caricature reminiscent of E F Benson rather than Jane Austen with whom Miss Pym is sometimes compared.
A fairer comparison might be with Rose Macaulay, both of them being keen Anglicans whose religiosity permeated their novels. However Miss Pym has less enthusiasm, and her ambivalent, churchy characters are reflections of what seems to be a rather unsatisfactory God.
In 1934 she wrote in her diary: "I am reading The Belief of Catholics by Ronald Knox but have not yet got far enough into it to know whether I shall become a Catholic or not". One shivers with a mixture of horror and delight to think how she might have dealt with her chosen subject-matter had she been in a suburban Catholic parish.
Catholic novelists tend to neglect the humorous parochial side of life, so we must make the most of Miss Pym's goodnatured satire and breezy humour. In her later novels she follows the pattern set in Crampton Hodnet and Some Tame Gazelle, writing, as one of her own characters puts it, "the same hook over and over again" and giving a very great deal of predictable pleasure.
Barbara Hamilton-Smith