I cooked dinner last night. I do this all the time, and I suppose that’s why it’s worth writing about, because I do it all the time and what else should I write about except the things that I do every day? Anyway, this dinner didn’t involve a lot of cooking, so it would be more accurate to say that I MADE dinner. It was a Greek steak salad, so the steak, which I sauteed and sliced into thin, small pieces, was the only part that needed cooking; that and some store bakery naan bread that I toasted in the oven for a few minutes.
It was a good summer dinner, very flavorful (kalamata olives and feta cheese make everything Greek, and everything Greek tastes good), easy, and healthy. But there was a lot of it. I had Greek steak salad for lunch today and I still have a ton of it left.
But I also have some chicken that needs to be cooked today, or it will go bad. I worried a bit about this as I drove home from work. The salad needs to be finished today or it will go to waste but I have to cook the chicken and that’s what everyone is going to want to eat. What to do, what to do?
To make a long story less long, I ate the salad one more time. The rest of the family ate chicken, and the chicken leftovers will still be good tomorrow. Everyone eats, and nothing goes to waste. This is the stuff that occupies my brain at least half the time, because this is the stuff that constitutes life. This is what being human is all about
*****
After two volumes of Bill Browder fighting with Putin, I needed a little peace and quiet, and so I returned to my now-beloved Barbara Pym. I’m not sure how I managed to live for over 50 years as an Anglophile and compulsive reader without reading Barbara Pym, but I am certainly making up for lost time. I’m right in the middle of the third novel of a three-volume anthology of Pym novels (A Glass of Blessings, Some Tame Gazelle, and Jane and Prudence) about genteel English ladies in the middle of the 20th century, ladies whose lives revolve around how to arrange the flowers in a manner that is artful but not too artful, and how to manage the complicated relationships with the domestic help, and what one should wear to the church picnic, and of course, what to serve the curate when one invites him to tea.
*****
None of the ladies in this trilogy of novels has anything that even resembles a job, and the female protagonists of the first two novels (a rather spoiled married woman in the first and two “spinster” sisters in the second) also don’t have children, but they are busy from morning to night. Their households are managed with painstaking care, with every detail from food to flowers to cleaning and polishing to furniture placement to mending and laundry carefully planned and considered. When the curate or the vicar or the archdeacon come to supper or tea, there’s no danger that our hostess will feed her guest the same thing that he had the last time he visited, because she keeps a diary that includes details on who came to dinner and what was served. I’m not the best cook, but I have a small handful of recipes that I do well enough to serve to guests. It’s a very small handful. At my house, the vicar would get the same roasted chicken or chicken fried rice or turkey chili every time he came to dinner, and he’d like it because this isn’t a restaurant for crying out loud. I wouldn’t need to keep a list to keep track, is what I’m saying, but I do applaud the list-making impulse.
*****
I read something about Barbara Pym, but I can't remember if it was part of an introduction to one of her books, or a journal article maybe? The former, I think, because I don't hang around the place reading scholarly journals. Anyway, her original publisher rejected An Unsuitable Attachment. It was the 1960s and apparently they thought that no one was interested in novels about English ladies and their clergymen and their housekeeping and gardening arrangements. Ridiculous, of course. After that, no one else would publish Barbara Pym’s work, and her literary career was all but over. But then in a 1977 magazine article, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both included Miss Pym on their lists of most underrated English authors, and she was in vogue again.
*****
If you listen to people who don’t know what they’re talking about, then you might go into a Barbara Pym novel believing that nothing is going to happen. In fact, that erroneous assumption about nothing happening might cause you to avoid reading Barbara Pym altogether, and that would be a mistake.
Read Barbara Pym, and you’ll find that things do happen. There’s no chaos or upheaval; at least not the overt, showy kind. At the end of a novel, a character might realize something about herself, and the reader will know that nothing will be the same for her after that realization. Or maybe the plainer and less vivacious of two unmarried sisters will receive the marriage proposal that the prettier sister expected, and the balance of power between the sisters will be altered forever. The things that happen in a Barbara Pym novel shake up just a few people, not the whole world.
But before anyone gets shaken up, in all the events leading up to the quiet but cataclysmic change in a character’s heart and mind or in the relationship between friends or family members, Pym’s women will spend much of their time thinking about food and bed linens and shopping and furniture placement. They’ll think hard about whether to alter their old coat and wear it for another season or give it to the church jumble sale. They’ll worry about someone showing up for tea when there’s only a small piece of cake left in the pantry. They’ll check on the servants to make sure they’re not wasting the silver polish. They’ll be busy day and night.
*****
During her time in the literary wilderness, Pym apparently considered changing her style, or trying to write about different kinds of characters and situations. But she didn't. She just kept working at her day job and biding her time. Maybe she felt that she couldn't write any other way, or maybe she knew that her stories would find an audience again because they're about the mundane, ordinary, routine, fascinating stuff that constitutes life. They're about being human.
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