The novelist
Between 1950 and 1961 Barbara Pym (1913–1980) published six novels. After a period of decline in sales and critical assessment, her publisher, Jonathan Cape, rejected her next novel and advised that she was no longer in touch with current literary tastes. She continued to earn her living as the assistant editor of Africa, the scholarly journal of the International African Institute, and wrote only in her spare time, but with diminishing prospects of publication. On 21 January 1977, the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) ran an article in which several well-known writers and academics listed what they considered the most underrated and overrated books or authors of the previous seventy-five years (a period covering the TLS’s existence). Barbara Pym was the only underrated writer chosen twice (by Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil). This rescued her from literary obscurity. Cape reissued her out-of-print novels and Macmillan took the unpublished Quartet in Autumn (Pym Reference Pym1977) which was then nominated for the 1977 Booker Prize. She had retired from the Institute in 1974 and died in 1980, by then a widely acclaimed literary figure sometimes compared with Jane Austen for her powers of ironic observation of the socially reserved English middle classes.Footnote 1 This article is based on a talk prepared for the Barbara Pym Society,Footnote 2 given in 2021, about her relations with the International African Institute.
The International African Institute
Barbara Pym began to work for the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures on 28 February 1946. Founded in 1926 by educators and missionaries with the support of prominent retired colonial administrators, primarily to develop educational materials, the Institute coordinated and published research on African languages and cultures. The name was often shortened to International African Institute, or IAI.
The IAI undertook both anthropological and linguistic studies. The orthography of African languages, of which there are many, was a particular concern. Children make better progress at school if first taught in their mother tongue, and this required reading materials in those languages. Standards had to be established for the printing of such books for Africa. The IAI also administered an award to encourage creative writing in African languages.
Pym makes fun of this linguistic aspect of the IAI’s work in her first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle (Pym Reference Pym1950). A Bishop delivers a lantern lecture to some rural English churchgoers. His audience is baffled by a recitation of the International African Phonetic Alphabet, followed by a rendering of some African songs. Pym probably encountered these songs in an article by the German ethnomusicologist, E. M. von Hornbostel, reprinted from the first issue of Africa, ‘Price One Shilling and Sixpence’, addressing the question ‘How can African music be used in Church and School?’ The box containing the offprints was still gathering dust in the editorial office during my time at the Institute.
Pym as house editor at the IAI
The quarterly learned journal, Africa, a major outlet for anthropological research on the continent, was the Institute’s flagship. For twenty-eight years from 1945 its editor was Cyril Daryll Forde. Forde continued to edit, and to direct the IAI after retiring from his chair at University College London (UCL) in 1971. Hiding the pain of a terminal illness, he worked a routine office day and died at home on the evening of 3 May 1973. Within a year Barbara Pym stepped into retirement. The IAI had been the sum of her post-war working life, and a constant background to her career as a published novelist.
Pym highly respected her boss’s intellect but thought he lacked manners (Holt et al. Reference Holt, Pym and Pym1984: 211). What Forde thought of her own manners is unrecorded, but his high regard for his editorial secretary is evident in the fact that her name eventually appeared as Assistant Editor under his as Editor, on the distinctive dust-red cover of each issue of Africa.
In addition to her work preparing the quarterly issues of Africa, Barbara Pym had practical responsibility for all other publication activities at the IAI. This included overseeing the publication of book-length volumes in the African Ethnographic Survey, a major documentary project started by Forde. She also had the editorial management of a series of specialist monographs on African Studies, published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the IAI.Footnote 3
In the same year that he became Director of the IAI (1945) Daryll Forde had taken charge, as Professor, of a new Department of Anthropology at University College London. He now had work enough for two people. Since he could not be in two places at once, Barbara Pym had considerable freedom to plan her own work at the Institute.
When Forde retired from UCL in 1971 Pym remarks that he then came into the Institute five days a week, making for a more hectic office environment in his last two years (Holt et al. Reference Holt, Pym and Pym1984: 299, Letter to Philip Larkin, 1 February 1970). It was during this period that she began work on her last novel, Quartet in Autumn, a book strongly influenced by Forde’s life, and death.
The pattern of her working life was shaped by the needs of the journal. Every issue of Africa had to have a quota of full-length articles (generally four per issue, copy edited and proof-read by Pym), in addition to book reviews, shorter notes, news items and occasional letters. Any time left over went on editorial work on the Ethnographic Survey and monograph series. There was also an international executive board to be supported (and at times entertained).
The stress associated with this ceaseless editorial work occasionally spills over into her letters to her friends, Philip Larkin and Robert Smith, a British historian based in Nigeria. As a university librarian and an academic historian of the Yoruba people of western Nigeria respectively, both interlocutors understood and sympathized with the peculiar pressures associated with her kind of work, not least the recurrent panic over remorseless publication deadlines.
It is sometimes commented that Daryll Forde’s encyclopaedic anthropological knowledge, second to none in British academia at the time, came in part from editing Africa for over twenty-five years. Barbara Pym worked with him on the journal throughout and must have gained a similarly comprehensive level of knowledge, if perhaps at a finer level of detail acquired through daily clarifying murky prose and checking obscure facts.
She uses this knowledge to convincing effect in her creative writing, but perhaps nowhere more so than in her comic portrayal, in Less Than Angels (Pym Reference Pym1955), of the costive Alaric Lydgate, an anthropologist who produced sardonic reviews but never proper articles. His field notes and African artefacts were eventually ritually reduced to ashes in a garden bonfire, which may have been Pym’s own imagined resolution to some of her work-induced worries and frustrations.
She comments in correspondence about having back-to-back articles of exceptional dullness, lack of content for the Notes and News section, and laggard book reviewers. The names of the worst offenders were entered into her ‘never to be invited again’ notebook (Holt et al. Reference Holt, Pym and Pym1984: 287, Letter to Robert Smith, 9 February 1968).
A couple of instances will illustrate some of the challenges she faced. In R. E. Bradbury’s contribution to the African Ethnographic Survey volume on the Benin Kingdom (Western Africa, Part XIII) eight pages from page 160 had been bound in upside down (Bradbury Reference Bradbury1957). This must have generated pandemonium in the office and a lot of anxious phoning around to decide what to do (pulp the lot?). I was given my own (faulty) copy of this monograph by Barbara Pym’s successor, Nicola Harris, presumably from a box of unsaleable items Pym never got around to throwing out.
The second instance reveals some of the complexities to be overcome in less than straightforward anthropological book publication. Government in Zazzau by Michael (M. G.) Smith (Reference Smith1960) posed a particular challenge, since it had several complicated fold-out maps, and an end pocket with nine or so family trees showing the descent of several important rulers in pre-colonial Zaria. Editing this material and ensuring the Oxford University Press (OUP) had assembled it all correctly in the shipped copies would have been the stuff of nightmares.
Pym took the challenges of her editorial work very seriously, even attending some of Forde’s lectures to be better prepared to edit work on anthropological theory. This would have helped with Government in Zazzau, since Smith was a devotee of the noted German social theorist, Max Weber. Perhaps for this reason the book lodged in her mind.
A hint of these challenges entered her writing in An Unsuitable Attachment (Pym Reference Pym1982, chapter 2) when she focuses on an incident in which a hapless young library assistant is ticked off for not knowing that while most OUP volumes are published in Oxford those published for the IAI had to be entered into bibliographical catalogues with London as the place of publication.
Possibly, the pull-out genealogies in the back pocket of Government in Zazzau were also implicated when she struck out the word ‘dissent’ and replaced it with ‘descent’, while copy-editing for Africa a paper on pre-colonial politics in Northern Nigeria by a young British historian (and anthropologist), Murray Last. In this case the paper was about political conflict, not generational succession, and resulted in an urgent visit by a distraught author, proof in hand, to demand reinstatement of his original title.
Her meticulous work on the hugely complicated (and much unread) Government in Zazzau was unrequited love. There is no acknowledgement to Barbara Pym in the preface. Maybe she thought Michael Smith, a protégé of Forde, also lacked good manners?
She fares better with The Lele of the Kasai (Douglas Reference Douglas1963), a similarly meticulous field monograph by another rising star in Forde’s UCL department, Mary Douglas. I knew Douglas quite well in her later life, and rather regret never having asked her about Pym. It would have been a fascinating conversation, linking two of the sharpest minds ever to analyse the inner workings of middle-class English domestic life!
It seems to me somewhat surprising that Pym makes little or no mention of Douglas in her letters documenting her IAI years, especially given that they shared an Oxford background. They would have interacted extensively over several of Douglas’s papers appearing in Africa prior to the book, and over the publication of the book itself.
Perhaps Mary Douglas’s seminal essay ‘Deciphering a meal’ (Douglas Reference Douglas1972) appeared too late to have been the subject of asides during telephoned editorial consultations. Douglas began to take her work to other publishing houses in the 1960s. But surely Pym would have agreed with her conclusion on English middle-class dinners that ‘the rules of the menu are not in themselves more or less trivial than the rules of verse to which a poet submits.’ (Douglas Reference Douglas1972)
Anyhow, whatever the case, Douglas indubitably had good manners and properly acknowledges Pym in the first edition of The Lele of the Kasai (‘I also owe thanks to Miss Barbara Pym for her help in seeing the manuscript through the press.’)
A year later Pym elicited an even more generous acknowledgement for her editorial work. In his introduction to Yakö Studies Daryll Forde (Reference Forde1964) writes that ‘I am grateful to Miss Barbara Pym, Editorial Secretary of the Institute, for her very great help in collating and checking the text of this volume.’ Pym commented, in a letter to her friend Robert Smith (8 December 1963), ‘Daryll’s book… is in second proof stage and of course I have to give it much attention, being so fulsomely thanked in the foreword.’ (Holt et al. Reference Holt, Pym and Pym1984: 261)
Pym documents her relationships with significant men in her life in considerable detail, both in her diaries and later in letters (Byrne Reference Byrne2021). Forde is different. He was a major presence for over twenty-five years, but the letters are highly circumspect. For a sense of what she thought of him we need to turn to the novels, where several characters reference his persona. Even at that, we are often shadow boxing over absences.
Arguably, it is his death that drives the plot of what some consider her greatest novel. I would suggest it is also her most anthropological. Quartet in Autumn is no longer about anthropologists, but about anthropology itself, and specifically the kind of anthropology with which Forde’s name is particularly associated.
Daryll Forde
Daryll Forde was a Londoner, with a local authority grammar school education. One imagines that this might be what Pym meant by his lack of manners, compared with those of her many private school-educated friends from Oxford. He studied geography and archaeology at UCL, coming under the influence of Grafton Elliot Smith, a pioneer in studies of the evolution of the human brain. After completing a PhD under the supervision of Elliot Smith, Forde was granted the opportunity of a Commonwealth fellowship for a two-year stay at the University of California, Berkeley. This exposed him to the ideas of Robert Lowie and Alfred Kroeber, students of the influential German American anthropologist, Franz Boas. Boas helped reorient anthropology from evolutionary (and at times) racialized explanatory frameworks to a focus on comparative cultural studies. Forde switched to the Boasian path.
This shift in her boss’s intellectual development is retraced in An Unsuitable Attachment, when the anthropologist Rupert Stonebird wearily explains that he is a lecturer in social anthropology, concerned ‘with the behaviour of men [sic] in society rather than with the size and shape of their skulls’ (Pym Reference Pym1982: 19). Forde then returned to the UK, to become the youngest ever head of the Department of Geography and Anthropology at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. For a time, his research comprised archaeological excavations in and around Aberystwyth, to which were added some cultural enquiries in a Welsh village. A Leverhulme grant then allowed Forde a six-month period of fieldwork in 1935 among the Yakö [Yakurr] people of the Cross River in South East Nigeria. A second research period in Nigeria in 1939 was cut short by the start of the Second World War.
Forde’s relative lack of time in the field was the subject of some gossip among his colleagues, even though perceptive commentators noted that he had done more with his limited opportunities than many anthropologists did with much greater field time at their disposal. A reason was that he was better prepared, commanding an armoury of analytical skills from archaeology, geography and cultural anthropology.
Forde then became involved in war work on Nigeria. West African colonies had a strategic role as the desert war in North Africa expanded. West Africa was the starting point for the ‘reinforcement route’ to Egypt.Footnote 4 The stability of the largest country – Nigeria, over which this vital supply line passed – became a vital strategic concern. Forde was recruited to an Oxford-based project to understand better the ‘native economies’ of Nigeria and, in particular, their capacity to feed themselves.
With the return of peace, Forde was appointed to lead a new Department of Anthropology at UCL, along the broadly Boasian lines it still retains today, and to direct the IAI at a time when decolonization was creating a demand in UK for better knowledge of the languages and cultures of Africa.
Fresh from her own war work (Byrne Reference Byrne2021), Barbara Pym was one of Forde’s first and most crucial appointments, since the IAI would have to carry out its essential publication activities under a part-time Director preoccupied with setting up a new field of academic research and education in UCL. At the Institute, Forde and Pym formed a formidably effective team and quickly built up an impressive output of new scholarly literature on Africa, despite the limitations imposed by post-war shortages.
In running both the Institute and a major academic department Forde shouldered huge administrative burdens. His obituarists also noted his generosity with his time in advising on the work of others, and the enthusiasm he showed for the advancement of anthropological knowledge in general. Breadth of interest and generosity of spirit were sometimes rather lacking among colleagues, as the ironic asides in Pym’s novels on the mannerisms and preoccupations of anthropologists returned from the field occasionally hint. If Forde was highly regarded among his peers, there was nevertheless one thing lacking – a major monograph on his own fieldwork.
Many sciences build knowledge brick by brick from a never-ending output of papers in top journals. Anthropology, at least in Forde’s era, was different. A substantial period of fieldwork led to a book-length synthesis on which one’s academic reputation then rested, supplemented by papers resulting from subsequent combings of left-over field notes. We have met two examples already in the monographs by Forde’s junior colleagues, Mike Smith and Mary Douglas.
Pym understood Forde’s predicament to be the equivalent of ‘a housewife faced with the remains of yesterday’s stew…wondering whether it can possibly be eked out to make another meal…’ One of her characters (Everard Bone) then makes an explicit comparison with anthropologists eking out a single short field trip ‘in articles and even books for the rest of their lives.’ (Pym Reference Pym1982: 97)
Forde’s two short periods of fieldwork in Nigeria had been interrupted by the war, and afterwards he was too busy in London to return for any length of time. A full ethnography of the Yakö was a book that remained to be written, and time was slipping by. Some of Forde’s colleagues (his student, Mike Smith, among them) urged him to plug this gap in his publication list by binding together his previously published papers on Yakö ethnography. It would not be the ethnography itself, but it could stand in its place.
Barbara Pym played a major part in this process of ‘eking out another meal’, working on the available ingredients to produce a passable approximation to the feast required. The papers had to be cleaned and filleted, to remove passages of repetitive background. The work could only be done by an editor with excellent knowledge of the kind of dish the offering was supposed to resemble.
The final product (Forde Reference Forde1964) was critically well-received. Forde now had his monument, confirming his status as a leading anthropologist. Perhaps only Barbara Pym could have rustled up such a convincing collation with the restricted resources at hand. As already noted, her grateful boss fulsomely acknowledged her editorial craft in his introduction.
Yakö Studies
Forde’s death in 1973 hastened Barbara Pym’s retirement in 1974 and gave her the impetus to complete her last novel, Quartet in Autumn. The novel, I suggest, dwells on themes raised in Yakö Studies. To make my argument I need to provide a brief introduction to Forde’s book, before turning to look at Pym’s last novel more closely.
Yakö Studies is based on nine previously published papers by Forde on a [then] 30,000-strong group of people of the Cross River basin, the Yakö.Footnote 5 The Cambridge anthropologist, Meyer Fortes, who wrote Forde’s obituary for the British Academy (Fortes Reference Fortes1976), described Forde’s ethnography of the Yakö as bringing to notice ‘a type of African polity that had, previously, hardly been known about.’
African rural societies were often organized into clans based on descent from a common ancestor. Normally, this ancestral reckoning takes place along the male or female line (through the father or mother’s brother). Anthropologists called these two ways of reckoning descent ‘patriliny’ and ‘matriliny’. They were generally seen as rival schemes, so to have both was unusual. In the anthropological jargon that Pym loved to mock, the Yakö were a group held together by double unilineal descent.
Yakö patrilineal clans could be seen on the ground. The members tended to live together. The matrilineal clans were harder to detect, except by family insiders. Forde brought to light these hidden inner connections. Mike Smith rightly recognized the quality of the fieldwork involved, short though it was, as reflecting Forde’s prior training as a geographer and archaeologist, allowing him to map out and statistically interpret organizational complexity not apparent at first sight.
A more basic question then arises. Why would the Yakö go to the trouble of keeping such a huge mass of complicated social information in their heads? The answer was that they used different means of reckoning descent for different purposes.
Access to land and farm labour was organized via the patrilineal clans. It was your father’s people to whom you turned when you needed help in cultivating yams (that made practical sense, because these relatives lived locally). But property – mainly in the form of livestock and money – passed through the mother’s line and, like the mother at marriage, livestock and money tended to move around. As a result, Yakö persons never quite knew when and where they might be lucky enough to inherit a share in some money or livestock from the mother’s side.
The prospect of a maternal windfall legacy was in effect a reminder to get to know and stay in touch with your mother’s family, scattered as they were across the wider Yakö landscape. All this doubtless remained vivid in Barbara Pym’s mind from her detailed work on piecing together Forde’s missing big book.
I have not been able to discover whether Forde knew Pym was a published novelist, or what he thought of this side of his editorial secretary’s life. Her quality was known to only a select few, led by her friend, the poet Philip Larkin. Her current standing as a novelist post-dates Forde’s death. Her published novels were physically present in the Institute offices at 210 High Holborn, shelved along with IAI publications retained when the rest of the library was sold to Manchester University due to lack of space. But I doubt they were much read, if at all, until 1977, when she at last became famous.
A passage in An Unsuitable Attachment (a novel written in the Forde era but not published until later) seems to suggest the kind of self-justification she might have offered, had her boss ever asked her about her life beyond the office. ‘Haven’t the novelist and anthropologist more in common than some people think…. After all, both study life in communities, though the novelist need not be so accurate, or bother with statistics and kinship tables.’ (Pym Reference Pym1982: 128)
Daryll Forde was rare among social anthropologists of his generation in making systematic use of statistics. The words about the closeness of a novel to ethnography are placed in the mouth of Everard Bone, a character who is a senior anthropologist. Were these sentiments that she hoped Forde might have endorsed? The possibility certainly arises that her last novel may have been consciously conceived to demonstrate the closeness of the links between the anthropologist and the novelist.
Quartet in Autumn
Pym appears to have begun writing Quartet in Autumn in 1972, but the work was probably largely a product of her retirement. In it, she sets out to give Everard Bone’s words some substance. She knew the secret of the eked-out stew that went into the cooking up of Yakö Studies. But she also knew the book’s argument about matriliny and windfall inheritance more thoroughly than most. The plot of Quartet in Autumn centres around the property that Marcia leaves to Norman. The idea of unexpected inheritance through women, shared by both books, is unlikely to have been a coincidence.
It is also far from being the only point of contact between the novel and Forde’s ethnography. Forde’s book makes considerable play of the role of age and cult among the Yakö, and these two elements also play a major part in Quartet in Autumn.
Age, of course, is a central aspect of the novel. Pym called it her book about old people, specifically a group of office workers who face retirement together, but without the overt age-group status enjoyed by Yakö elders. There will be no further public recognition, in retirement, that they were once a team. The members of the office ‘quartet’ will have to turn to other organizational resources to rebuild their lives.
As in many Pym novels, cult also plays a significant part, generally the cult of High Anglicanism. But in Quartet in Autumn the novelist takes trouble to make it clear that only one of the four (Edwin) is attracted by such ceremony. Like Edwin, the Yakö shopped around for cult experience; a plurality of cults was an important aspect of Yakö religion but not a significant unifying factor. Likewise, in Quartet in Autumn, cult plays no unifying role. Cult in Quartet in Autumn is a means to exorcise ghosts or calm the restless spirits of the departed, resorted to only by those (such as Edwin) especially troubled by such things.
Significantly, it is only Edwin who takes up the invitation to attend the memorial service for the late director of their Institute, evidently a Forde-like eminence. He sees himself as going on behalf of the group, and then discovers something decidedly strange – a memorial service devised by an institution its detractors called the Godless Polytechnic of Gower Street.
University College London was founded to provide university education for non-conformists, atheists, Jews and women. The board rejected any religious identification within the college confines. Memorial services for late professors were sometimes held in the Church of Christ the King, physically adjacent to the back of the college. This was rented by the university chaplaincy but belonged to Catholic Apostolic Church (‘Irvingite’) trustees. In the view of the College, it was a convenient rather than a sacred space, and in any case many UCL professors were atheists. Edwin cannot find his bearings in what seems to him a contradiction – a church service for non-believers.
Barbara Pym attended the memorial service for Forde at Christ the King, remarking in a letter to Philip Larkin (11 July 1973) that ‘DF was not a believer, so it wasn’t very Christian … [consisting] of readings and music with an address by a colleague’ (Holt et al. Reference Holt, Pym and Pym1984: 323). She then promptly adapts the experience to the needs of her new novel.
When I first read the episode in Quartet in Autumn (Chapter 11) I was struck by the skill and precision with which she had captured the peculiar ambience of this distinctive rite. Forde’s memorial took place before I joined the Anthropology Department at UCL in 1979, but I participated in quite a few subsequent memorials along these lines. This was because I belonged to a reasonably competent College-based string quartet, and we were sometimes invited to play the music that interspersed the readings and address.
Our small repertoire of solemn pieces was carefully chosen to avoid striking any religious note of reference. Alas, anything from the wonderful sequence of quartet pieces by Joseph Haydn on the Seven Last Words of Christ was out of the question. Edwin’s dilemma of whether to take a second glass of sherry in the reception afterwards for fear of falling asleep at his desk in the afternoon was also repeatedly our own.
In Pym’s novel the memorial service gently concludes Forde’s place in her story. Thereafter, one of the quartet – Marcia – dies, and the fate of the remaining members becomes the focus of attention. A feature of Forde’s book on the Yakö now comes to the fore, namely the idea that tracing social connection through a woman is as significant as tracing it through a man, because each system of reckoning does different things in terms of facilitating further social relations among the living.
The office hierarchy in which the quartet had worked had been male dominated, with a Forde-like figure as patriarch. But Norman’s security in retirement results from unexpectedly inheriting Marcia’s house in her will. This notion of inheritance facilitated by the agency of a woman now drives the plot of Quartet in Autumn as surely as the entailment on Mr Bennet’s property requiring his daughters to marry well drives the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
Quartet in Autumn also speaks to another anthropological concept that Pym will have acquired from her close working association with Forde – that of (so-called) fictive kinship. A working life often builds strong social associations. Old soldiers sometimes treat former comrades as members of the family. The story of Quartet in Autumn unfolds around another such working group bonded by fictive kinship sustained into retirement.
Pym never married but maintained strong relationships with former flames (Byrne Reference Byrne2021) and was keen to explore, in her final novel, the implications of such fictive relationships. Friendship, as well as kinship and affinity, she seemed to suggest, has its own enduring social structure.
What Pym had in mind is perhaps reflected in her choice of title. ‘Quartet’ might simply indicate a foursome – the four main characters of the story ‘related’ through their shared work as support staff in the Institute. But she was musically well-informed, and the novels embrace a broad framework of reference stretching from Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade of Pale to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, even if the Yoruba folk opera, Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, a performance of which was arranged by the historian Michael Crowder for the entertainment of the Executive Committee of the Institute, was not to her taste.
It is plausible, then, that she may have had a string quartet in mind as her model of fictive social cohesion. A string quartet is a musical formation dependent on internal direction, and self-effacement by its individual members. It owes nothing to a conductor. A star soloist would wreck the proceedings.
Barbara Pym spent the larger part of her working life as an essential member of such a self-motivated team in the service of a higher academic goal. A focus of her novel is the channelling of the sense of disciplined teamwork to the social challenges of retirement. This is a new theme in literature, and she tackles it with a self-confidence reflecting her grasp of African anthropology.
The group of retirees in Quartet in Autumn has to find another basis for association than the common task the members shared for many years. The proposed answer is to take fictive kinship seriously. The bonds forged by cooperation and friendship are too valuable to be squandered on retirement. They need to find another outlet. The task binding the group of retirees is now how to invest shared meanings in Norman’s windfall inheritance.
Pym applies Yakö rules to the space Forde has vacated. The inter-generational transfers must be handled properly. Without attention to the details the social world cannot flourish again after death has done its destabilizing work. Postmortem distribution can at times take on the character of an unseemly fight but at others it is a collective endeavour to relocate items in a way the deceased would have recognized and approved. It is in appreciating the social values of the deceased, not ‘who-gets-what’, that inheritance reinforces cohesion among the living.
The episodes with the milk bottles and the redistribution of tinned supplies are thus both richly comic and deeply touching in the way that they bring the hitherto hidden domestic concerns of the departed team member to the notice of the others, who then search for the most fitting way of re-ordering a domestic microcosm overturned by death.
To some, this sorting out of the affairs of the departed might seem trivial. But it is not a joke. Pym’s skill is to bring out the deeper meaning of ‘trivial’. Anthropologists might term it quotidian ritual. By this they would mean that life takes on meaning through its minor gestures. Without a grasp of these small inflections the larger ceremonial occasions make no sense.
We see this at work in bereavement. The living gain new strength from aligning themselves with the overlooked concerns of the dead. No longer making fun of absurd anthropologists (the ritual burning of Alaric Lydgate’s field notes is well behind her) she now applies what she has learnt from Forde about the devolution of assets at death to her own social world. Pym derives in Quartet in Autumn a lesson that we are all bonded by friendship, and that friendship is nurtured by careful observance of the smallest details of our interactions. What could be more anthropological than that? The book, undoubtedly, is a lament for Daryll Forde, expressed as a virtuoso display of what he had taught her.
