I have been asked by the editor of Green Leaves, to write a short piece about the origins of my engagement with Barbara Pym’s work and  the reason for writing Felicity & Barbara Pym.

When did I first encounter Barbara Pym? Honestly, I don’t know. I cannot remember my introduction to Miss Pym. I can remember our subsequent rendezvous, but not the first. I know where it occurred, however – in my favourite small independent bookshop, one of many scattered throughout the picturesque city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Housed in an early Victorian building, this tiny haven had an untidy explosion of books, a host of Pym titles, and an air of not really being there, a portent that it actually fulfilled by quietly disappearing some years later, much like the world of Barbara Pym.

I clearly remember buying my subsequent Pym books there so I imagine I purchased the first there as well.  Oddly, I rather like not remembering my first purchase, since it now seems that Barbara Pym has always been a part of my life and remembering the first encounter might dispel that fancy. But why Pym?

Although I am often regarded as a scholar, I am not and what I will say next should be irrefutable proof. I am a writer. And a reader. I bought and read these books (many times) because I liked them. No other reason. I was not smitten with their verbal frugality or blazing characterisation. I wasn’t enamoured by their innovative treatment of time. I wasn’t intrigued by symbolic meaning. I just liked them. A lot. That’s all.

Later, much later, I was to discover, savour and investigate all those things, and more, though never in the manner of the theorist or critic. I am a literary writer. A fellow writer’s work engaged me for many reasons, some of them profound, and I appreciated that.

The answer to the second half of the request above is this: In its inception, Felicity & Barbara Pym, in a slightly different format, constituted part of my rigourous Master of Fine Arts degree requirement at Mills College in California, one of the few remaining private Liberal Arts colleges for women in America. In order to qualify for the MFA in Literature & Writing, (at that time, at least) one must both study literature and write a creative work. One’s thesis must give evidence of accomplishment in both. I thought that writing a creative work about the study of literature would be a fascinating way to demonstrate such accomplishment.

In thinking about how to go about this, I realized that I had inherited much of my literary philosophy from my own undergraduate tutor, Dr. Christopher Terry, who had been a student of FR Leavis at Cambridge and a literary exemplar to me two decades earlier.  His great pedagogical/literary gift to me – the interrelatedness of all of literature, and the literary history and context I hold in my head – was something  I wanted to pass on to my students with the conviction, passion, discipline with which I had been taught. I chose to centre this thesis around Barbara Pym, because by then, I had become deeply engaged with her work. I knew it well and saw that not many other academics did. As there was comparatively little written about her, I could fulfill one of the principle tenets of scholarship: to make an original contribution to Literary Studies. If I could illuminate the worth of this “obscure” author, to a very young and not very interested college student standing on the cusp of the 21^st Century, in a creative work, I felt I would have earned the title of Master, which was about to be conferred on me. Felicity and Barbara Pym is what evolved.

This thesis was very well received, duly filed in the library, the MFA was conferred, and life went on, as one would expect.

What one did not expect is that ten years later, this dormant document would be resurrected in Wales, by publishers who loved it. Nor did I expect the outstanding reception it has received nor the unqualified approbation of Hazel Holt (whose books I had of course read and whose knowledge I revered) when Cinnamon Press, unbeknownst to me, asked her to write the Foreword. I did not expect that my fellow authors on the Red Room (a superlative society for writers and authors) would promote it with such enthusiasm, nor that academics would like it at all, much less commend it.

I’m delighted this is so, of course, and particularly gratified that only three weeks after its official debut in the UK, an American literary agency acquired the property to represent in the United States, so there will be an American edition of Felicity and Barbara Pym in the near future.

~ Harrison Solow, BA Hons, MFA, (PhD pending),  in Green Leaves, the official publication of the Barbara Pym Society.

________________________________

October 22, 2010, 8:01 am

Even today’s best literary studies rarely possess what those in the book trade call “crossover potential”-that is, any appeal for the average intelligent reader who resides outside the ivory tower. Harrison Solow’s Felicity & Barbara Pym, recently published by Cinnamon Press, is a happy exception. The volume is, at its core, a heartfelt appreciation of the oeuvre of the author who produced, in Solow’s canny words, memorable portraits of  “silly men” and “mousy women.”

But Harrison Solow’s approach is unique. She constructs her case not through normal narrative, but via a series of imagined professorial communiqués to a young disciple who has taken up the study of Pym. As her book wends its way through this budding personal tutorial, it also offers sharp, provocative asides on academic politics, scholarly nonsense, and such unlikely subjects as science fiction, comparative religion, and the culture of Hollywood. The result is enlightening, entertaining, unconventional, and, above all, readable.

“Any idiot can take a hatchet to the Pietà or a book,” writes Solow. “How many who do so can create one?” If, however, as Eliot assured us, that there will be time to murder and create, Solow has demonstrated in Felicity & Barbara Pym the capacity to do both. The following interview offers some insight into how she does so:

Read more…  http://bit.ly/c80Rgs

There were three winners and books were sent to each.

One person I never heard from. One sent a thank you email. And one person wrote an actual letter ~ a lovely letter ~ with pen and ink and posted it to the return address on the package. He also wrote a blog post about the experience of reading Felicity & Barbara Pym. Here it is:

http://bit.ly/9MAMhb

The first double feature in Carpe Articulum’s history and the first to feature two members of the same family!

Thank you for your email ― I am glad that our correspondence seems to be of help. And you have finished Some Tame Gazelle. Now we begin.

Your notes aren’t bad. You have touched on a few themes that Pym’s biographers, editors, and critics analyse repeatedly: Silly men. Mousy women. Tea. Religion. Quotations. These are worthy of mention. The fact that you still think nothing happens is not. It merely shows that you do not respond to what does happen in the novel, for whatever reason ― innocence, feminism, scepticism, youth, cynicism, thoughtlessness, expectation, or too rapid and therefore too shallow reading of the novel ― too light, perhaps, a perception of the economy of expression Miss Pym employs.

This is not to say that you must respond to what happens in any particular way nor even like these works; I merely point out that a good many things happen. I will list a few of them:

Three proposals, (plus another, if one counts Bishop Grotes’ reconstituted offer to poor Connie Aspinall) two marriages (ditto), self-discovery, self esteem ― a little spurt of power. Laughter happens. Some measure of levity happens. Tea is poured, in ritual obeisance to something everyone (at least in this novel) wants, and conveys: a sense of belonging, a place, a value. Tenderness happens – care is given and received. Uncertainties are created – then, miraculously removed. A loved one is remembered. A sense of satisfaction prevails.

Are none of these “events” that you would seek for yourself? If these things happened to you, would you regard them all, equally, as nothing?

You ask me again why you should read literature. I feel I should not answer you. It is a question posed by an undergraduate to whom the questioning of established conventions is still a novel and somewhat heady experience undertaken for its own sake. Why ask me? I did not choose your course of study. You could have taken sociology, physics, or architecture. You have circumscribed your own world, for the coming semester at least. There is no point to the question if you yourself cannot answer it. Why should you read literature?

Perhaps you should not.

However, I suspect you feel you would like to, and that is the basis of your irritation with silly men, mousy women, tea, religion, and quotations. Is this worthy of the august company of Dante, Proust, Dostoyevsky? It may interest you to know that Barbara Pym felt as you do, when she was about your age – reading Aldous Huxley, and imagining herself in a more glittering, a more significant, world. And so to protect herself from an unbearable exclusion from that world, she wrote a novel, Young Men in Fancy Dress, in hope, her biographer says, of becoming part of it.

Her irritation with silly men was no different from yours, or mine, or anyone’s really, you see. The only difference is what each of us regards as ‘silly.’  Literature, or at least, books  (I will not presume to add Pym to the Masters, as you call them – although surely there are degrees of literature) offer a way out – out of a time, a space, a life, a status, a level of experience that is unsatisfactory to the reader. Not by virtue of escape, but by metamorphosis, via instruction. As you are being offered a way out of literary exile by the recommended guide ― books, maps, and in the end, one hopes, transportation to the inherited literary land of Barbara Pym. And although you may not now want to arrive in such a place, you have chosen it as your destination. But I suppose you must. After all, it does not make sense that you should have chosen to enter a fictional world you find irritating (though you may realise that it is possible to learn something from it).

Oh ― but see what Miss Pym’s Huxley had to say in Those Barren Leaves:’ If we wrote it ourselves, we might find Etruscan literature interesting.’

Does it have to be your world, Felicity, in order to be habitable, respected, interesting, relevant? ‘It’s so provincial,’ you complained to me of Some Tame Gazelle in your first letter. But you see

…provincialism does not signify in a writer, and may indeed be the chief source of his strength: only a fool or a prig would complain that Defoe is cockneyfied or Thomas Hardy countrified. But provincialism in a critic is a serious fault. A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a wide outlook, or he has nothing at all…”

In a letter to a friend, not long ago, I wrote this sentence: “I’d like to be in Wales – my Wales, where the leaves on the ground lift in response to a wind that isn’t there and uncover for a millisecond, small vibrant worlds.”

Before I comment on this sentiment, which was neither deliberately constructed, nor designed, but sprang from my hand, fully formed before I got a chance to see it, I would like to very briefly discuss the concept of liminality, which is a very new area in literary studies – or rather a very old phenomenon that has recently captured the attention of those in literary studies and thus, been named an “area.”

See the entire the essay at: http://tinyurl.com/liminality-solow

Excellent news for American and Canadian readers and those from other countries.  Here is the link:

http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9781907090110/Felicity-and-Barbara-Pym

Later this week I will be posting excerpts from the book.

All good thoughts to all ~

Harrison

Also yesterday, a new review was posted on Americymru, a Welsh-American cultural organisation to which I belong.  (“Cymru is the Welsh word for Wales).  This is it:

This book is a delight to read though perhaps somewhat harder to review since It defies easy classification. The work is epistolary in form, though the epistles in this case are digital since we are presented with a series of emails written by an advisor to her student. The student has an assignment on English writer Barbara Pym to complete and she is not entirely happy about it. She complains that ‘nothing happens’ in Pym’s novels, a common charge brought against a wide range of authors by novice literature students. I have heard this complaint advanced against Jane Austen, M.R. James and a host of others in my own classroom experience, indeed against anyone who does not include the Hollywood triptych of ‘bonk, car chase and gunfight’ in their narratives.

In the course of explaining what does happen in Barbara Pym’s novels her tutor, Mallory Cooper illuminates an entire era of British social history and references a wealth of literary sources and resources which cumulatively bring the author , her world and her novels vividly into focus. If Barbara Pym was not formerly on my ‘to read’ list then she is now.

Of course the book is much more than an explication of Barbara Pym. It attempts to answer the question:- “Why read literature?” and offers conclusions which are the fruits of Ms Solow’s (soon to be Dr. Solow) many decades of literary study and experience as a practicing writer.

All in all this is a book for anyone who cares about literature and wants to advance their knowledge of it. It provides , perhaps surprisingly for a work which is so very scholarly in tone and content, a thoroughly engaging and engrossing reading experience. An unreservedly recommended title from a masterful writer.”

~Ceri Shaw

_______

You can read this and a little more at: http://tinyurl.com/amcyreview

Americymru will be interviewing me about Felicity and Barbara Pym this week. I will post the URL as soon as the interview is published. This will be my second interview with Americymru. The first can be found at:

http://americymru.ning.com/profiles/blogs/an-interview-with-harrison

Gyda chofion gorau i bawb (With best wishes to all)

Harrison