Barbara Pym Centenary Symposium

Two hours of heaven. Yesterday the NYU Humanities Initiative hosted a panel on Barbara Pym. From left: Salon's Laura Miller, NYU's Patrick Deer, event mastermind Perri Klass, food historian Laura Shapiro, and novelist Cathleen Schine.

Deer unearthed Pym's 1978 appearance on Desert Island Discs and illuminated how, in her layered modesty, she's doing the same thing in the interview that she does so well in her books. (Listen to that broadcast here.) Through her research at the Bodleian reading Barbara's notebooks, Shapiro made the delightfully impassioned case that Pym was promoting the Mediterranean diet before Elizabeth David. Klass ran through brilliant excerpts showing how Pym used drink to reveal character. Shapiro explored the dividing line between readers who do and don't appreciate Pym and said she resisted comparisons to Austen because Jane idealized her young men and Barbara would never do those unqualified blissful endings. And Cathleen Schine praised Pym for "embracing imperfection as the human condition" and perpetually depicting the private self intersecting with the public world, arguing she was a "brave" writer and "pretty radical." She said she constantly reads Pym and Trollope, and Pym was the only author she could read after 9/11, and she had considered doing a major Pym tribute for the centennial but "once you write about something you can lose the magic, and this a writer I can't afford to do that with."

People lamented the reading public's widespread ignorance of Pym's work, the lack of availability, and the unfilmable interiority of the novels. Schine, who has had two of her novels made into movies, said she felt the one Pym that could be adapted is Quartet in Autumn, "but it would have to be by an artist."

After the suitable reception, I went directly to a bookstore and bought The Three Weissmanns of Westport [only $5.60 for you]. I had, wrongly, drifted away from Schine's work after The Evolution of Jane, and how I've missed her voice and eye and humor. The abandoned wife refers to her husband's mistress Felicity as Pleurisy. Since her marriage ended, Schine has been open about living with a woman and her gayest book is She Is Me [Kindle]. Three months ago FSG published her ninth novel, Fin & Lady.

Comments

[Bob Smith]

Damn, I wish I knew about this!