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in - its smallness.
If
Howard is grand (and very American) in her
ambitions, Pym remains deliberately circumscribed (and very
English) in hers , and where Howard's women entertain visions that
are gaudy, shocking and chic, Pym's country mouse females enjoy
the most modest, even moth-eaten of dreams. (It is noteworthy too
that the American heroine is young at forty-three; the English–
woman aging at twenty-seven .) Pym's patient, diffident women–
blue of stocking, not of blood - treat life as if it were a book they
were not writing, but reading. So too, Pym is determined to have al–
most no designs upon the reader, no great expectations, no intricate
patterns except in her plot. Her charm lies in her innocence of lit–
erary fashion, her willingness to sew together a series of shrewd ob–
servations into nothing more, nor less, than a solid, old-fashioned
entertainment.
From the deflationary title of
No Fond Return of Love
to its bene–
volent conclusion, Pym restricts herself to the narrow imaginative
limits occupied by her unprepossessing heroine. Like the rest of
Pym's fiction, this novel resembles nothing so much as a cramped,
somewhat lonely little bed-sitter complete with floral wallpaper,
well-made bed and pot of strong tea. Psychically, the weather fore–
cast always calls for mild drizzle ; the menu generally offers up
macaroni cheese, tomato soup and boiled potatoes, with Nescafe for
pudding; the dramatis personae include nobody except timid
scholars, spinsterish researchers and bachelor clergymen. And all
the .excellent women are, of course, themselves vicars - unrewarded
consolers and confession-takers who choose to live vicariously.
Pym catches the tiny tremors and shy sorrows of these women
manques with such glancing precision, balancing amusement and
sympathy so evenly (and instinctively) that every incident becomes,
as the heroine regards a friend, "at once comic and pathetic." Her
eye infallibly alights upon all the humble objects that are, as she puts
it, "mean" unless or until they are transfigured by sentiment. Above
all, she expertly calibrates the gradations of embarrassment, regret
and disappointment. "Life," she ventures, "is often cruel in small
ways." The sentences that stick here, and the sentences that sting,
are always spoken softly: "It is sad, she thought, how women longed
to be needed and useful and how seldom most of them really were,"
or "Perhaps it is sadder to have loved somebody 'unworthy' and the
end of it is the death of such a very little thing, like a child's coffin."
The transforming grace of Pym's measured compassion is that
she brings to her sheltered characters the same strict wistfulness they
