The title itself, taken from a George Herbert poem, strikes the precisely correct balance between the spiritual and, well, spirits: “When God at first made man/ Having a glass of blessings standing by/ Let us (said he) poure on him all we can.”
Pym’s comic novels are parochial affairs involving, mostly, tensions in Anglican vicarages and the lives and longings of highly literate, rather lonely people who occupy their time with careers as index-compilers, translators, proofreaders at scholarly journals and the like. Blessings is a little different in that its narrator, 30-year-old Wilmet, is comfortably married, with subtle but not inexpensive taste (“I always like myself in deep clear colours”). She has a great deal of leisure time in which to flirt and be flirted with, although she approaches men with an innocence not far removed from Jane Austen. Nothing outwardly momentous occurs in the book, although she clears up some misconceptions about her marriage, friendship and romantic fantasies—and this is momentous enough.
The road to this new maturity is dotted with constant breaks for lunches and dinners, usually with company that is highly amusing and quite happy to share a cocktail, a glass of wine or sherry. She will have a Tio Pepe while waiting alone for a late lunch companion. On another occasion she will have a glass of Chablis with a chicken fricasee at home. She invokes a spumante, its bubble gone flat, when remembering her younger days in Italy.
Pym, a quiet master of the comic novel, uses such details very carefully: These references to wines and drinks are slipped in nearly always in a scene in which Wilmet is feeling gay, nostalgic, romantic, triste or all of the above—scenes in which she is being most essentially her daydreaming self. Just as she dresses, so she drinks: Alcohol seems to be a matter of “deep clear colours” that add a certain lilt to her mood. If, in an early chapter, Wilmet elects to have a martini at the start of a dinner party, it’s because “it doesn’t seem quite the weather for sherry—too mild or something.”
The conversation turns to which sort of wine would best complement a dessert of gooseberries. “If you like,” says a guest, “I will raise the matter with my own wine merchant—a man of considerable courage, even panache.”
Much later, Wilmet has lunch with her old friend, Rowena, and with both affection and envy the two of them observe young lovers meeting at a nearby table:
“They’re going to drink a whole bottle of claret,” said Rowena in a low rather sad voice. “What will they do afterwards? Walk in the park? … They might go to an art exhibition… Really modern art is extraordinarily sympathetic when you’re in love and have eaten and drunk well.”
There’s no need to go overboard with any of this, except that Pym captures so well, and so glancingly, how subtly wines and spirits feed a sense of glamour, anticipation and sensuality. (Pym’s characters tend toward a frumpy, tentative mousiness, which might make the transfigurative aid of wine even more significant.) You can also argue that she includes a cautionary note of the abuse of alcohol: Wilmet is mildly (and misguidedly) infatuated with an old friend, Piers, who clearly drinks too much. But that doesn’t make him any less funny or charming—it just hints at a personal conflict within him that Wilmet is slow to understand.
I suppose this is really a very roundabout way to encourage people to read this wonderful writer. And if you have a glass of sherry with it, you won’t be any the worse.
