Some Tame Gazelle

I have read the reviews of this marvelous novel and am amazed at some of the reactions plus the review that went on and on about the characters and their actions without ever capturing the humor or the inherent truth in these characters. I did not know that this was the first "adult" novel that Pym wrote. Along with The Sweet Dove Died, it is my absolute favorite and captures English life in a small town in a certain time as Trollope did on a bigger canvas in his novels of English life in the Victorian time. The sisters are stark contrasts of personality and temperament: Harriet, pudgy, flirtatious and afraid to be taken seriously runs from romance when it is presented to her; Belinda, more dour, introspective and hopelessly infatuated with the biggest fathead in the area--the Archbishop--maintains her crush thereby avoiding romance as it comes to her as well. She is not unlike Scarlet O'Hara--obsessed with someone who, when the time arrives, finally realizes what a dullard he is, just as Scarlet finally realizes how weak Ashley is and how she has wasted her time longing for him. Unlike Melanie, however, who understood and complimented Ashley, the Archbishop's wife seems fully aware of his faults, his pompous personality and, one assumes from the story, would not think twice about giving him to Belinda and declaring "good riddance" if the opportunity so presented. This perfect portrait of the silliness and sweetness and little dramas of everyday life even in a small town is beautifully painted by Ms. Pym who was a portraitist equal to Trollope or Austin. I loved this book and have re-read it several times as I have with Pride and Prejudice and Emma. Open it up, settle down somewhere comfortable and enjoy the personalities we so often meet in life and who are so artfully drawn by Ms. Pym.

In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelles" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (one of Pym's "Excellent Women")elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"),jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.

Barbara Pym is a brilliant writer. I, of course, am not the only one who thinks so, or we might never have seen half of the work she eventually published. After writing and publishing 5 novels, with both critical and commercial success, Pym found her 6th novel rejected by her publisher, and by every other publisher she submitted it to. The 60s had arrived, and the sharply pointed humor of Barbara Pym was no longer in fashion. In spite of the rejections, Pym continued to write for 17 more years with what appeared to be no hope of sharing her writing. Luckily, as with most Pym stories, a bittersweet ending allowed the world to have another half dozen Pym novels in print to delight in. SOME TAME GAZELLE, the second novel she wrote (the first was very much juvenilia) and the first she published (following two separate rounds of editing during the next 12 years), is her funniest. Casting her eye to the future, she wrote about her Oxford friends, and about herself and her sister, Hilary, in middle age. Full of inside jokes, the novel's tongue-in-cheek tone sparkles throughout. Pym is a brilliant writer because her sentences are gems. She is funny because of WHAT she says and HOW she says it. And, finally, she is MEAN in the most pleasurable possible way. Pick up any novel by Pym and delight in her. You will be well rewarded.

I have just reread SOME TAME GAZELLE and would like to write a comparison to Pym's other novels, for readers trying to decide between them. Of course, they are all marvelous, if you enjoy her kind of very gentle English social humor.SOME TAME GAZELLE is, I think the most light-hearted and optimistic of Pym's books. The world it presents is very established and secure and the character of Harriet is one of her bubbliest and most life-affirming. The ridiculous foibles of all the characters are looked on with a very forgiving eye. The down side of this book is its moral seems to be the more things stay the same, the better. Naturally, this doesn't make for a very exciting plot (none of her books are very plot-heavy, but this least of all) and there is a flatness to the ending. The humor is also less profound. The relationship between the sisters is the strongest element in this book. The weakest is that it doesn't end up very far from where it started out. But that certainly is a delightful and amusing place.

Although it was not her first novel to be published, this was one of Barbara Pym's earliest endeavors. I read in A Very Private Eye (a collection of Miss Pym's letters and journals) that she started writing it in her early 20's, basing the main characters on herself, her sister, the man she was in love with at Oxford, and other friends. However, she aged them all considerably, making them 50-ish years old. I think she may have worked on the book again later, so I don't think it's actually the work of a 22-year old. Miss Pym appears as Belinda Bede and her sister as Harriet. In the story, they are two spinsters living together in a small village. Interestingly, later in life Barbara Pym and her sister did live together. The character of their clergyman, a married Archdeacon, is based on a man sharing the same first name (Henry) whom Barbara Pym was devoted to in college. He subsequently broke her heart by marrying another woman. The fictional Henry, too, is married, but has been so for 25 years. Belinda/Barbara is still devoted to him, but with warm affection instead of burning passion. It's hard to explain the appeal of this book. It has humor; Barbara Pym saw the funny side of ordinary happenings and people. And it has pathos, which is a crucial ingredient of the best humor. There is even a touch of feminism, although gentle. For example, when Henry remarks to Belinda that women "enjoy" being martyrs, she repies that they may martyr themselve, but they leave the enjoyment of it to the men. Like Jane Austen, Barbara Pym limits herself to "a few families in a village," and like Jane Austen she succeeds in providing insight, irony, and, withal, enjoyment and optimism.