Prescription: Four pints of tea per day

Dose: IV per diem

A high consumption of tea has been a feature of English daily life for a couple of hundred years - but is now not so common, nor such a central feature, as it once was. 

Except in my house...

The Inklings - that Thursday late-evening writing group of such importance to CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien - was characterized by the consumption of tea; as is evident in the histories of its deliberations. 

Another Inklings member Charles Williams stated that, if compelled to choose only one beverage, tea would be his choice; since it had the status of a necessity in his creative life, rather than the pleasant luxuries of beer or wine. 

Barbara Pym's novels from the middle 20th century are similarly permeated by tea drinking; at home, in afternoon parties, and punctuating all forms of social event - whether Parish Councils, or Anthropological lectures. 

Indeed, one of her recurrent minor characters, Esther Clovis, is represented as having been at the centre of a dispute over tea that led to her leaving one learned society for another - it seems she made the tea using hot water from the tap instead of boiled water - a heinous crime...

Of course, coffee has, especially over the past forty years, grown to displace tea and dominate the consumption of hot drinks in England as elsewhere - especially in public meeting places. My aunt and uncle who would punctuate an afternoon shopping trip to the city (Newcastle) with At Least two cups of tea, is a thing of the past - anyway café coffee is currently far too expensive for that kind of high frequency consumption.

Nonetheless, my wife and I do our best to continue the tradition (albeit modified to suit our needs); with a chronic regime of At Least four pint mugs of weak, Earl Grey, tea with milk - per day. 

Notice: Barbara Pym continues

A decade ago-plus; I wrote a couple of posts about the English novelist Barbara Pym (1913-1980); and this is just to say I have continued to re-read these on an approximately two-year cycle ever since. 

I never seem to tire of her early novels; and every new reading brings a delight all the greater for being sure and certain. 

My present encounter is to hear the main five of the earliest novels on audiobook - currently Less Than Angels - which would probably be a good first try for anyone interested in exploring her work; since many of the  major "themes" are there (these include High Church Anglicans, anthropology, middle-aged spinsters, "distressed gentlewomen", and curates) and a large cast of younger people as well. 

Pym's alter ego (there is always one in each novel) is this time a writer: the bohemian, thirty-something author of women's magazine stories. 

Pym is very much a minority and specialist taste as a writer; it's "comedy of manners", based on close observation of foibles and reactions in the minutiae of everyday living. 

Not much happens: a church jumble sale or a seminar on African languages counts as a Big Event. 

But for some people in certain mood; BP is just what is wanted - a real treat.  

Notice of The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment by L Jagi Lamplighter

There are not many new novels that I enjoy these days (although I used to read recent fiction voraciously up to my early twenties) so I am always delighted to discover something that hits-the-mark; and I will always re-read any novels that I have enjoyed (often several times).

So I was very pleased to come across the Books of Unexpected Enlightenment by L Jagi Lamplighter:

http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/works/the-unexpected-enlightenment-of-rachel-griffin

(I will not be including any 'spoilers' in this notice (it is not a 'review') so that anyone who likes the sound of the books can discover what happens for himself or herself.)

There are three novels, so far, in this series; and I have enjoyed them all very much, with re-reads being even better than first time.

They are distinctly odd books, to me; I haven't come across anything of the kind before. They are light and humorous in tone, mostly - pitched at a Young Adult readership; but also very complex in terms of their magical and fantasy system ('hard' fantasy in terms of world-building); and they offer a lot of 'glimpses' of further vistas and back-stories (in the same kind of way The Hobbit does).

Many of the 'ingredients' of the books are quote explicitly, and indeed self-referentially, drawn from other fantasy works (such as the Narnia Chronicles and Harry Potter) - but the way they are combined, twisted and added-to creates an unique 'flavour' which I find very appealing. 

The character of 13 year old magical schoolgirl Rachel Griffin provides the point of view, and she makes an unusually multi-faceted heroine for this kind of book; yet she reminds me of several 'tomboyish' young women I have from real life - both in my schooldays and as an adult. Rachel combines courage with romanticism, innocence with encyclopaedic knowledge, she is independent - yet very loving of family and devoted to friends.

Indeed, her character and the books are strange in that way that sometimes strikes me when I realise (for the umpteenth time, yet it is still rare) that women are different from men not just biologically but in some deep and existential fashion; such that it is like sharing a world with elves or some other 'species'!

(As a believer in Mormon theology, I regard men and women as complementary parts and the completion of the wholeness of Man (there is no generic 'human being'); and that we all are either a man or a woman, in essence and from eternity. So to know Man it is not enough to know men - that is incomplete; one must also know women.)

The Rachel Griffin books are therefore fantasy fictions from a woman's spiritual perspective in a way that is not the case for, say, Harry Potter - and in a totally different way from the large mass of anti-men fiction-by-women.

(Which itself isn't all bad by any means! One of my absolute favourite novelists, Barbara Pym, is very bitter about men - not for doctrinaire reasons, but as a consequence of her own unusual nature and experiences.)

Anyway, Jagi Lamplighter's Books of Unexpected Enlightenment are both light and entertaining reading, packed with adventure, incident, love and friendship; but they also have touches and glimpses of something distinctive and deep. Some people, like me, will find them quite special and endearing with a flavour all their own.

The novels of Barbara Pym - an overview

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I do not read many novels these day; but I do read and re-read the 'comic' novels of Barbara Pym (1913-1980).

She is a discovery of the past fifteen or so years, and an absolute delight to me. I would not say that the books are in any way 'essential reading' or an exceptional source of human wisdom - but they are worthwhile stuff; and people who like this sort of thing will find them the sort of thing they like.

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In an obvious sense, Barbara Pym writes about the world she knows, and the people she knows, a world which is now gone - but is English, upper middle class, genteel and based-around the Church of England (although aware of the decline in that institution, so that it is inhabited mainly by spinsters and elderly women, and celibate clergy).

So it is a world of vicars and curates, Parish meetings and jumble sales and church festivals, discussions of High Church ritual (incense, robes and the like) - a world firmly based on church life but yet a world with very little real Christianity anywhere (I get no sense at all that Barbara Pym was a 'genuinely religious' person)^.

It is also a world of scholarly activity - on the fringes of academia: journals, editors and their assistants, typing, proof reading, index-making - and especially of anthropology (Barbara Pym was assistant editor of an anthropology journal).

Also a world where people have learned and quote poetry, English lyrical poetry, and use this to express their deepest emotions.

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So far this sound terribly staid and conventional, and it is; but what is very unusual is Barbara Pym's built-in assumptions about men and women. She was unmarried, but apparently had several sexual 'affairs' as an undergraduate in Oxford and at other points in her life. She also moved on the fringes of a homosexual subculture which intersected with High Church Anglicanism.

In particular, Pym seems to assume that women are mostly attracted to men's looks (in the same way that men obviously are usually mostly attracted to women's looks). So her books always have a handsome but vacuous - often charmless and inept - man around whom various women are buzzing.

The heroines generally despise these handsome men, but seem helplessly attracted - and often marry them, or seem just about to marry them, as the book ends - providing the semi-romantic structure of the basic comedy plot.

Also, there are no children in her novels, and indeed a positive hostility towards the idea of children.

All this is very a-typical for women - and particularly of women of Pym's station and era.

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Strangely, this oddness about men and children was a factor from the very early novels, written in her early twenties. Some Strange Gazelle has as the central character a (very nice) middle aged spinster who has spent her whole life helplessly in love with a handsome senior clergyman that she met while an undergraduate at Oxford University (he is now her neighbour, and married to someone else). This 'Archdeacon' has no attractive qualities, except his looks and good education; he is dull, selfish, unromatic - but she wants merely to serve him in little things.

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Anyway, the best of Pym's novels are those she wrote before 1970; the later ones I find unreadable.

The early ones are fresh, lively, and somewhat broad in their comedy - with the characters being somewhat caricatured; but very well worth reading nonetheless. They are Some Tame Gazelle, and the posthumously published Crampton Hodnet and Civil to Strangers.

The very best are Excellent Women, Less than Angels, No Fond Return of Love and (posthumously published) An Unsuitable Attachment.

These all have really likable heroines (those of EW, NFRL and AUA being strikingly similar - rather 'plain' but pleasant-looking, dowdily dressed, socially anxious and over-sensitive to suffering; compulsively helpful and full of good works); with eccentric (but realistically so) casts of characters, great genial good humour, and close observations of the minutiae of life.

Jane and Prudence is a bit below this level, with rather annoying eponymous central female protagonists, and a rather intrusive and jarring 'anti-men' undercurrent. And the least good of these novels is A Glass of Blessings which is written in the first person by a vacuous and un-Pym-like 'glamorous' heroine.

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I could not honestly recommend Barbara Pym to many people, she must surely be a minority taste - and I realize how unappealing these novels sound in summary! Nonetheless I personally find them a sheer pleasure to read; and as soon as I have finished going through them, I look forward to the next re-reading.

As a measure of how much I like them, I have read all the novels twice to my wife at bedtime (so clearly she loves them too) - in addition to several private (silent) readings and listening to a few as audio-books.

In fact, it was an audio-book of No Fond Return of Love, borrowed from the library, which began the whole thing...

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^See also: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/was-barbara-pym-christian-or-subversive.html
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Was Barbara Pym a Christian, or subversive of Christianity?

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As I have mentioned before, I don't read many novels these days - but one author I return to with renewed delight is Barbara Pym (1913-1980).

I find her early books (those written up to the time of the posthumously published An Unsuitable Attachment) to be completely enjoyable: even after several readings.

The type is 'comedy of manners' - with a generally satirical edge.

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I hesitate to 'recommend' Pym as her subject matter is so narrow: the doings of a thin social stratum of lower-Upper Class English people in the middle of the Twentieth Century - a world of librarians, minor academics, anthropologists and editors, spinsters and their paid companions, 'distressed gentlefolk'; and the High Anglo-Catholic church with its Archdeacons, vicars, and especially the young as-yet-unmarried curates - who are often the romantic interest. In sum, the the exact world of the author's own experience.

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But after a few re-readings I became aware that the underlying motivation of the novels was almost the opposite of their surface.

Because Pym writes so much about church life - from its services to its fund-raising 'jumble sales' - that when I was an atheist I had assumed Pym was a Christian.

But I now perceive there is not the slightest molecule of faith in her books. So rather than being about the Christian life, they form a very detailed representation of an a-religious society built mostly around the church and its activities.

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And, although Pym writes about 'romance' - in that (as with all classical comedies) the books tend to be about courtship leading towards marriage; they are anti-romantic, since there is a strong anti-man animus which arises from the fact that her heroines are only attracted by men they dislike.

Indeed, Pym's women seem to be motivated almost wholly by the looks of the men, almost without regard to their character or position; although there is also (and this is more usual) an attraction to high status.

So there is a sense of men as irresistibly attractive beings to whom a woman is drawn - and to whom she offers the sacrifice of her love, time, indeed her whole life - expressed in one novel in terms of a recurrent trope that 'men need meat' - giving the man the best meat and the largest share of meat, in a time of rations and shortages.

Men, on the other hand, are unaware of the fact that they are cosseted and privileged by women, simply take for granted that women are serving them left, right and centre.

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This perspective on the relation between the sexes is peculiar and essentially false - and I think, almost unique to Barbara Pym. In a nutshell, it is inverted: that the average reality is one in which men are attracted to women for their looks (mostly) and good looking women are pursued and privileged and cosseted (even though they may be unaware of this, may take it for granted).

Pym's autobiography makes clear that this was, however, her own experience; and one which dominated - and in a sense ruined - her own life.

As so often with women geniuses there is, therefore, a strongly masculine aspect to Pym: as evidenced by her male-like sexual attraction for looks she herself felt and which she incorporated into her novels; and her inverted world in which the men were the courted sex.  

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But it does make for good novels and much humour. (And bears similarity to the world of Bernard Shaw's plays and novels, where the same inversion is seen; but presumably for opposite reasons.)

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It is possible that Pym's perspective was exacerbated by her own situation in the post Great War era where there was such a shortage of upper class men, that the few remaining were competed-over; and a high proportion of upper class women never married - against their own wishes.

Barbara Pym was not herself good looking; yet she was attracted mainly by looks - so (since she was not in any serious sense a Christian) she had a love life of hopeless passions for unattainable men, and intermittent affairs with handsome wastrels, and on the fringes of the homosexual subculture (which was very much a part of the Anglo-Catholic church by that time).

It was these bottled resentments and frustrations which - in her youth at any rate, when there was energy and freshness, and when she seemed uncannily to forsee her own likely future - led to the edge of the humour in her novels.

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At any rate, she is one of the absolute favorite novelists I have discovered in later life, and one of the most wholly-enjoyable.

And perhaps it is this strange paradox - whereby the obvious surface level is so utterly contradicted by the implicit subtext - that makes her books endlessly re-readable.

If Pym had had the slightest glimmer of Christian belief, she might have made an excellent (Anglican) nun; but this was never on the cards, and she lived for her writing; which life was sadly cut-off by her inability to publish Unsuitable Attachment. 

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Recommended books - any of the early work, none of the later work; but my favourites are Excellent Women, Less than Angels and No Fond Return of Love.

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