The New Criterion

Barbara Pym
No Soft Incense:
Barbara Pym and the Church,
edited by Hazel K. Bell.
Barbara Pym Society, 115 pages, GBP 7.50

Although No Soft Incense, the title of this collection of essays put together by the Barbara Pym 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 Pym-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 Pym 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. Pym 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 Pym… . 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. Here’s a conversation between Father Neville and his mother.

“It may be that I shall have to marry her … I mean that it might make things easier all round, and I dare say she’d make quite a good wife.”

“I thought you didn’t hold with marriage.”

“I don’t really, for a priest, but there could be situations where one might have to sacrifice one’s principles for the happiness of another person.”

Father Gabriel Myers—not one of Pym’s priests but a Benedictine monk and organist—has contributed three lovely little pieces on aspects of Pym, from a fan’s pilgrimage to a pleasant study of “Miss Pym and the Victorian hymn.” Father Myers has a nice blend of tone and subject matter added to a not unseemly amount of personal detail. Life in a religious community has made him sympathetically attentive to Pym’s descriptions of the human difficulties of Christianity. Ivan, in The Brothers Karamazov, both scoffs at and agonizes over Christ’s impossible imperative to love even the least of our brothers as we love him. Pym’s method of teaching that lesson is rather different. Based on his experience in a monastery refectory, Father Myers singles out Mildred’s cri de coeur when she finds herself in a cafeteria: “This place gives me a hopeless kind of feeling… . One wouldn’t believe there could be so many people and one must love them all.” Her companion, Mrs. Bonner, “looked up from her chocolate trifle, rather shocked. ‘Oh, I don’t think the Commandment is meant to be taken as literally as that.’”

The collection also includes useful, brisk lists of things like Pym’s London churches and a Clerical Directory à la Crockford’s, working out at 5.76 clergymen per novel.

Really, this volume is a happy dipping book for fans, so it would be a churlish cavil indeed to note how many quoted passages repeat from essay to essay. Friends, after all, enjoy chuckling over their favorite tidbits—or at least are willing to indulge their friends in that harmless pursuit.

Pym might have admired the “enviable detachment” of her anthropologists, but she did not share it. In his introduction, James Runcie (not to be confused with the former Archbishop of Canterbury) describes her mode:

Barbara Pym’s writing contains both gentleness and a startling lack of ego that both tempers and blesses the acuity of her observation. It celebrates all that is best of Christian wisdom and generosity; hopeful without being trite, loving without being naive, comic without being cruel.

Pym’s satirical eye rested lightly—fondly, even—on the congregated personages before her, even as they dwindled through “Rome, Death, and Umbrage” (and, as the contributor Joy Grant notes, “the greatest of these was Umbrage”). Let us pray that we find ourselves at the disposition of so benevolent an author.

---