Miss Pym disposes.(No Soft Incense: Barbara Pyre and the Church)(Book Review)

Miss Pym disposes

Barbara Pym No Soft Incense: Barbara Pyre and the Church, edited by Hazel K. Bell. Barbara Pyre Society, 115 pages, 7.50 [pounds sterling]

Although No Soft Incense, the title of this collection of essays put together by the Barbara Pyre Society (it is available on the Society's website at www.barbara-pym.org), is not in fact the title of one of Barbara Pym's eleven novels, it mimics her penchant for picking up phrases from obscurish English poems: Some Tame Gazelle (Thomas Haynes Bayly), A Glass of Blessings ("The Pulley," Herbert), The Sweet Dove Died ("The Dove," Keats). Pym's titles are obscure both in the sense that you might not have heard of them and that you can't quite tell what they're supposed to mean even once you have.

The phrase "no soft incense" (modified Keats) pleasantly poses a Pyre-like conundrum: no incense or a lot of the heavy stuff? Incense is a problematic commodity in Pym's anatomy of the Church of England. Too much reeks of Going Over to Rome; none is really Too Low. The trick is getting it right.

 
   It was dark and warm inside the church and 
   there was a strong smell of incense. I began to 
   wonder idly whether it was the cheaper brands 
   that smelt stronger, like shag tobacco or inferior 
   tea, but I was sure the Father Thames 
   would have only the very best. 

No Soft Incense has a pleasantly amateurish air from contributors who make up an almost stereotypical cast of Pyre characters, largely divided into Excellent Women and Clergy. The institutional affiliations of the two lay men are impeccable: one served in the Coldstream Guards before joining the Department of Manuscripts at the British Museum; the other taught History at the University of Lagos (Pym, you may recall, worked at the International African Institute and created the wonderful Bishops of Mbawawa and Nybongaland). The sole tiresome contribution is a heavy-handed and verbose essay drawing on Bakhtin and feminist theory on Milton. I thought at first the essay must be a parodic homage to the anthropological papers delivered to obscure learned societies by characters such as Esther Clovis and Everard Bone, but, alas, it seems to be intended straight. Pyre herself quotes Milton in a lighter spirit, as when two characters discuss a newly attached couple: "'Imparadised in one another's arms, as Milton put it," Basil went on. 'Or encasseroled perhaps--the bay leaf resting on the boeuf bourguignon.'"

One of the contributors who wears her learning more modestly is the detective novelist Kate Charles (whose books were called by The Guardian a "bloodstained version of the world of Barbara Pyre.... Could make one late for Evensong"). Her essay on Pym's clergymen as a kind of third sex--neither fish nor "holy fowl"--is a model of apposite quotation in the service of a sensible thesis. ...