TWO GLASSES OF BLESSINGS

 

There’s an essay by Jonathan Lethem in which he says 

that every summer he goes on holiday, taking a Barbara 

Pym novel with him.  He says it doesn’t matter which 

novel because he can never remember whether he’s read 

it or not, and in any case they’re all pretty much the 

same.  This may sound like a complaint or a criticism but 

in fact he’s a big fan of Barbara Pym, as am I, and I know 

just what he means.

 

The other day I started reading, in fact rereading, Pym’s A Glass of Blessings.  To be fair to myself I did remember certain aspects of the plot and I saw that I’d dog-eared a page or two here and there so I must have read at least some of it.

 

The martini makes an honorable appearance, just as it does in Pym’s earlier Jane and Prudence, 1953, in which Prudence consoles herself by eating alone in a good restaurant ‘A dry Martini and then a little smoked salmon; she felt she could manage that.’ Pym capitalizes Martini.

 

I don't believe Pym's heroine looks even remotely like this.

Early in A Glass of Blessings, 1958, the heroine/narrator Wilmet Forsyth’s husband Rodney, known as Noddy (yes really), brings home a work colleague from the Ministry and busies himself making drinks.

‘I think I’ll have a dry Martini,’ says Wilmet.

‘Gin always gives me a dry mouth,’ says Sybil, who is Wilmet’s mother in law.      

        ‘You sure you wouldn’t prefer a gin and lime, dear?’ says Rodney to Wilmet, his ‘hand hesitating on the Noilly Prat bottle.’

        ‘No, I’d rather have French please,’ says Wilmet.

 

Some interesting nomenclature there.  Gin and lime is presumably a synonym for gimlet, French apparently a synonym for a martini or is it just for vermouth?

 

Later at some church social Wilmet observes ‘I myself seemed to belong to two very clearly defined circles - the Martini drinkers and the tea drinkers though I was only just beginning to be initiated into the latter.’

What a world in which Martini drinking precedes and supersedes tea drinking. That’s my world, actually.

THE SECRET SAUCE/SOURCE

I’ve been whiling away the empty hours by turning to an online version of The Secret Museum of Mankind.  

It’s been put online by one Ian Macky, who sounds like a heckuva guy.  According to his website he lives in northern California, drives a Triumph TR6, and is interested in succulents and Tesla Coils among other things.  

Macky describes The Secret Museum this way, ‘Cannibals. Fakirs. Crime and punishment. Rituals. Slaves, cults and customs. Warriors and weapons. Equestrians and equilibrists. Musicians and mendicants. Dance, dress, undress and body modification. Structures, conveyances, beasts, and more breasts than you can shake a stick at! This is The Secret Museum of Mankind.’  It wasadvertised and sold as the ‘World's Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs.’

All of this is sort of true.

However, much of the book is scurrilous, imperialist, probably white supremacist avant la lettre.  Its capacity to find the non-white races simultaneously savage, disgusting and comical, is so extreme that it is in itself comical, though that doesn’t make it any less forgivable.  And of course the problem is all in the captions, since the images don’t quite speak for themselves.  Interpreting images from other and little known cultures is always tricky and never neutral, but The Secret Museumreally doesn’t try.

Still, the images remain fascinating, and I was interested in the pictures relating to food in Africa, of which there are a good few, as you see below.   Africa incidentally is conceived of here as just one big undifferentiated landmass.  Names of places and tribes are thin on the ground in the text. I’ve omitted the more glaringly offensive parts of the captions, which probably makes me guilty of post-colonial revisionism, but here as you see: 

WOMEN GRINDING THE CORN THEY HAVE GROWN These two wives are painfully grinding Indian corn for their husband's repast. How little can be ground at a time is shown by the few seeds on the nether stone.

Women of the Kavirondo tribe, inhabiting the north-east end of Lake Victoria, are most enterprising. They pursue agriculture, herding, hunting, and fishing with their menfolk, and are their tribe's only ‘medicine-men.’ The flesh of some wild animals is greatly esteemed by the Kavirondo, particularly that of the wild cat and leopard; plucky and dextrous hunters, the fiercest hippopotamus and largest elephant invariably succumb to their traps and spears.

Meat is dear to the heart of every African native, and best of all he likes it red and raw from the animal just after it has been shot. He will gorge himself on meat grilled or fried, minced or chopped, or cut into strips and dried in the sun …

 Rice is the staple food of all the Malagasy tribes, and appears at every meal. Manioc root, potatoes, and other vegetables also form part of the ordinary dietary, with a little meat or fish. Other things eaten as a relish with rice are snails, locusts, certain kinds of caterpillars, moths, and a heterogeneous collection of creatures dredged from shallow water and including shrimps, water-beetles, and insect larvae, so that a certain variety is ensured to this otherwise vapid food. 

Vapid? I mean, really.

Meanwhile I have been moving on, reading more Barbara Pym.  You’ll see how this ties in.  Less Than Angels, published in 1955, is set among anthropologists and their co-workers in London.  Various (mostly male) characters are always going off ‘into the field,’ though the action of the book never leaves England.  

Here are some characters at a suburban party for anthropologists and civilians, and Pym did work at the International African Institute so this adds some authenticity to what might otherwise seem to be some unlikely dialogue.

‘What do people eat in Africa?’ asked Mabel earnestly.

‘The Hadzapi tribe will eat anything that is edible except the hyena,’ declared Alaric precisely.

‘Oh well …,’ Mabel spread out her hands in a hopeless little gesture.

‘Our butcher wouldn’t offer you hyena, anyway,’ giggled Phyllis.

‘Most Africans are very fond of meat when they can get it,’ said Tom.

‘Yes, and many of them relish even putrescent meat,’ said Alaric solemnly

‘Do they understand the principles of cooking as we know it?’ asked Rhoda.

‘Oh yes, a good many of them do,’ said Alaric, ‘In some very primitive societies, though, they would just fling the unskinned carcase on the fire and hope for the best.’

Here is a picture of a youthful Hadzapi (they’re a hill tribe in what is now Tanzania) sinking his teeth into something or other, definitely not hyena, though hard to tell whether or not it’s putrescent.  The picture comes from the flickr feed of Possum Inc.

You can find Ian Macky and The Secret Museum online here:

http://ian.macky.net/secretmuseum/index.php

GIN AND LIT.

OK, I accept that reading books and drinking gin may not be the complete solution to our Corona-virus troubles but they certainly help.  And will it surprise anybody that there’s some crossover between these two things?

Here for example is Anthony Powell’s Journal entry for August 29 1990.  Roy Jenkins has come to lunch: ‘Before lunch Roy drank gin on the rocks with a dash of sherry, somewhat exotic taste.’  Which frankly surprised me.  Powell was a sophisticate, surely he’d been around enough to know that Jenkins was drinking a not very exotic variation on a martini.

Barbara Pym’s name pops up from time in time in Powell’s journals, though as far as I can tell they never met, and this led me to her novel No Fond Return of Love.  It’s a cracker. There is some less than exotic gin drinking here, drunk at room temperature with water, no ice or slice.

          And there’s a funny, if not altogether convincing, episode when two of the novel’s characters – Pym would have had no problem referring to them as spinsters – go into an off license to buy a quarter bottle of Gordon’s.   

Dulcie says ‘Perhaps we should have a corkscrew.’

‘A corkscrew? Oh madam,’ the salesman laughed quite pleasantly, ‘you won’t need that, I can assure you.’

         When her fellow spinster says she surely must know how a gin bottle opens, Duclie replies, ‘I know you don’t need a corkscrew for champagne, but I’d forgotten about gin.’

It was a different time, the book was written in 1961, but it still doesn’t quite ring true that a somewhat formidable middle aged woman wouldn’t know that gin bottles have screw caps.

The naivety of course is the character’s, not Barbara Pym’s.  In Jane and Prudence, Prudence is consoling herself by eating alone in a good restaurant ‘She must be unusually kind to herself today.  A dry Martini and then a little smoked salmon; she felt she could manage that.’ 

This was written in 1953.  There was still rationing in England!  I have no statistics but I imagine that very, very few women were drinking martinis alone in restaurants in 1953, though I’d love to be proved wrong.

I haven’t been able to find a picture of either Powell or Pym with a drink in hand, but as you see, cat pictures are comparatively common.