Penelope Fitzgerald
Book Details
Hermione Lee
PENELOPE FITZGERALD
A Life
528pp. Chatto and Windus. £25.
978 0 7011 8495 7
A workmanlike biography of Penelope Fitzgerald persuades us that she was one of the finest writers of her time – but the novelist herself remains an enigma
A. N. WILSON
Penelope Fitzgerald poses a number of insuperable problems for a biographer. First, in life as in prose, she was the mistress of what was left unsaid. She carried discretion far beyond the point of impenetrability. Her fictions are stories of unspoken, misunderstood, unrequited love, of unsatisfactory marriages which are never – as they might be in a modern therapy session – talked through, of ironies which depend for their effect on semi-silences. Her life, too, was apparently lived on the principle of diffidence. As an undergraduate at Oxford, she wrote an article – for Cherwell, the student newspaper – about the impossibility of young women, such as herself, using strong expletives. "When I fall in love, which happens twice a year, and wish to end a tempestuous quarrel, I usually say, 'Drat you'. When my heart is broken, I say, 'cripes!'"
For the rest of her life, she kept her lips buttoned. Her drunken barrister husband was disbarred for fraudulently cashing cheques that belonged to the Clerk of his Chambers; the family drifted into Micawberish poverty; and the family home, a shabby Thames barge, sank at Chelsea wharf – all these disasters were weathered somehow or other. "In the family", a daughter told Hermione Lee, "the court case was never mentioned." Lee quotes Fitzgerald's observation on the Waugh family, who "formed a conspiracy against the outside world, not feeling the necessity to explain itself".
This makes it difficult for a biographer to know where to start. But with Fitzgerald, there is a further difficulty. She was herself a biographer of very distinctive brilliance. The joint biography of her father – "Evoe" Knox, the editor of Punch, and his three brothers – Dillwyn, the Second World War code-breaker, and the two clergymen Wilfred and Ronnie – is a manifesto for her understated, in most cases actually unstated, way of life. She must have had enough material there for a door-stopper, but she boiled it down to fewer than 300 pages. The Life of Edward Burne-Jones (1975) – decorously vague as it is about whether he ever slept with this or that muse – not only gets to the heart of a great artist but also seems to have wiser things to say about William Morris, Victorian art, Ruskin and life itself than whole libraries of other books on the subject. And there is the strange Life of Charlotte Mew – of which more in a moment.
Fitzgerald's skill as a writer was always sure when she wrote biographies; but her method would probably not be acceptable to a modern publisher. Lengthy plot summaries of her novels, and – in accounts of the latter days of her success – such matters as Booker Prize dinners, prize committees and publishers' parties, were presumably demanded. The heart of the matter – which in her three biographical books Fitzgerald so unerringly lasered – is in her own case much harder to locate. One can imagine her quiet smile were her ghost to read Lee's gallant attempt to make bricks without straw. That mysterious shade would find a book in which few of her enigmas are addressed, let alone resolved.
Fitzgerald was born into an intensely bookish Hampstead household. A barmaid, surveying Penelope's impeccably suited father, once asked E. V. Knox what he did for a living and he replied, "I live by my wits". Acquiring scholarships with the ease with which other children grab sweets, Penelope became a good linguist at Wycombe Abbey, was at Somerville with a clever pre-war generation, and achieved a congratulatory First in English. She sailed into a job in the BBC as a scriptwriter during the war. This period was used in her amusing, if inchoate, novel Human Voices (1980). Then she met Desmond Fitzgerald, a brave young soldier, and married him. The reader, but not the author, of this biography, wonders whether his gallantry as an officer with the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, in North Africa and Italy, led to his later problems – his alcoholism and his inability to do much with his life. After the never-to-be-mentioned debacle, he worked as a clerk for Lunn Poly, and was able to give Penelope the free holidays in Russia and Germany which gave her background for her best fiction. He is described on his death certificate (he died aged fifty-nine) as a travel agent.
It does not appear to have been a happy marriage, though Penelope always maintained that it was, and ever had been. ("She was always telling him what to do", a relation recalled.) There were three children. Penelope's possessive love of her son Valpy made it impossible for her to accept his beautiful Spanish wife: one of the only moments where the veil is lifted in this story comes when we see Penelope being a shockingly bad mother-in-law. "Penelope's efforts to like Angeline often relapsed", Lee tells us, without offering any evidence of such efforts.
After the houseboat sank, Fitzgerald took her husband and children to live in a council flat on the edge of Clapham Common. Desmond and the daughters had one bedroom each; Valpy shared with one of the girls when he came home from university. Penelope slept on the sofa, and made it clear that marital relations were over. She earned her keep through all these years as a teacher in a variety of settings – first at the stage school we recognize in At Freddie's (1982), then at Queen's Gate School, Kensington, and the establishment later called Westminster Tutors. A Queen's Gate pupil remembers "her mild high voice often straying off into silence, and with a surprisingly sweet, warm smile". Another pupil's diary recorded:
January 22 1965. Morning, treble English. To the lighthouse. Suzanne Judy & me drawing talking. Please I mean I am so sorry but honestly if you don't like it please try to understand you see. Write about something like making the tea no please I mean I expect you don't do such low things as that . . . . Mrs Fitzgerald double First Oxon.
What this astute pupil (Jane Martineau) asks about Fitzgerald, the hopeless teacher, the reader will also want to ask about Fitzgerald the non-writer. Why did the clever Somerville girl who was clearly producing sharp material as a student and as a fledgling scriptwriter, and who clearly wanted to write, simply give up until she was in her late fifties? To answer: "Because her husband was a drunk", or "Because she had three children" is not to solve the problem. "I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated, or even, profoundly lost", she wrote in the introduction to one of her novels. Clearly, she must have thought of herself as one such, even though on one level she was in control, and it suited her to be the one person in the marriage who was halfway competent. After his death, Penelope said, "The truth is I was spoilt, as with all our ups and downs Desmond always thought everything I did was right". She was archly unworldly, seeming to confuse improvidence with holy poverty. Just as she could not swear or talk about sex, she could not discuss money. She refused to have an agent; and when, after she had found success, her publisher, Stuart Proffit, tried to make her discuss the advance for her next novel, she wrote back with deliberately boring details about her grandchildren and no mention of the contract.
This "unworldliness" could be seen as simple sanctity, but those who choose to masquerade for a living, whether as novelists or actors, are never simple. (This is one of the themes of At Freddie's, and the haunting conclusion to that brilliant novel – the genius child actor secretly practising a jump over and over again in preparation for playing Prince Arthur in King John – is surely meant as an image of the private life of the dedicated artist.) One wonders whether Fitzgerald held out so long before writing a novel because she so was so sharply aware of the difference between good and bad literature. This "caricature of a schoolmarm . . . odd socks wouldn't surprise you" (as one fee-paying London pupil described her) hesitated to put pen to paper unless she could write something in the same league as her heroes – Samuel Beckett (a surprise, that), Jane Austen, Chekhov.
To read through the works of Penelope Fitzgerald cannot fail to be an enjoyable experience; but it yielded, for me at least, a shocking sense that she was nevertheless highly uneven as a novelist: I had not realized this before. The unevenness must have stemmed, in part, from the fact that she started so late. "The lif so short, the craft so longe to lern" really is true. Fitzgerald was fifty-nine before she published the biography of Burne-Jones. Of her nine novels, only three are pure gold – At Freddie's, The Beginning of Spring(1988) and The Blue Flower (1995). Human Voices, about the BBC during the war, nearly hits the mark, and is always enjoyable to re-read. The other works of fiction have amateur charm, but they read like novellas written by an old lady for other old ladies; and if they were the only thing she had written, it is unlikely that their author would have become the subject of a substantial biography by the former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford.
In a rare moment of letting the mask slip, feeling herself patronized by a publisher after she had written a couple of biographies and two novels, a furious Fitzgerald asked, "How many books do you have to write . . . to lose amateur status?" The problem, as she said on another occasion, was that she was "an old writer who has never been a young one". This is the core of her mystery, since she always – evidently – knew that she had it in her to write, but left the words unwritten, just as she had left so much unsaid in her emotional history. You can't put it down to chance. It is impossible to believe that much in Fitzgerald's writing, or in her life, was really left to chance – much as her tone would like us to believe that sentences, like a string of unsatisfactory jobs and living arrangements, came about faute de mieux. The diffidence masked, not lack of confidence, but its opposite. She knew exactly what she wanted to do as a writer, and it suited her to have a series of chaotic outward circumstances to explain how she failed to achieve them. Yet, in those books that hit the bull's-eye, the hit is so palpable that we cannot suppose it was accidental.
Whereas some writers alternate between writing fiction and non-fiction, and there is little connection between the two activities, in Fitzgerald's case, the three biographies are all in their different ways templates for reading her fiction. Hermione Lee makes the striking observation that it was not a novel, but the biography of an all but forgotten poet, Charlotte Mew, which marks the pivotal moment of Fitzgerald's career as a writer: "[Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, 1984] is the crucial turning-point, the hinged door, between what, in another writer, you might call 'early' and 'late' work". When, in Camden Town in 1928, Mew took her own life by drinking a bottle of Lysol, she was the age Fitzgerald was when she published her first book. A local paper, reporting the suicide, spoke of her as "Charlotte New, said to be a writer". Characteristically, Fitzgerald, who had come to cherish the tragic poet, did not end her book on this grotesque note, but with a gentle diminuendo. "For a short while, she recovered consciousness, and said, 'Don't keep me, let me go'. This was her last attempt to speak to anyone, this side of silence." Known only for a few poems (one of which, "The Farmer's Bride", was a great favourite of Thomas Hardy), Mew spent years of her life not writing at all, subsumed instead in her family's various madnesses, and in domestic trivia – the difficulty of paying the rent for increasingly unpleasant lodgings shared with a demanding mother and a dippy artistic sister. Life was punctuated by the drama of falling painfully and unrequitedly in love with women. Mew clearly stood for something in Fitzgerald's self-image. "She was struggling with the three great miseries of her life, the kitchen range (which kept going out), the boiler (which threatened to blow up) and 'flu." Years and years would go by without Mew doing any writing, so obsessed was she by her mother's illnesses or the boiler going wrong. Hard to know, then, in what sense she was a writer at all – except that she thought of herself as one.
As a child, Penelope had collected the beautiful rhyme-sheets sold in the Poetry Bookshop run by Harold Monro and his formidably beautiful Polish wife Alida. Mew was one of these "Poetry Bookshop" Georgian poets, whose merit is all but invisible these days, and Fitzgerald had persuaded herself that she was "at least sometimes . . . a great poet". Novelists have ways of twisting experience to suit themselves, projecting themselves into the most unlikely roles. Fitzgerald was clearly bitten by the tragicomic romance of tiny, chain-smoking Mew, the domestic drudge who, just occasionally, produced great art. One of the women Mew loved was Ella d'Arcy, a fellow contributor to The Yellow Book. D'Arcy, who did not reciprocate Charlotte's feelings but admired her poetry, made the comment, "One acts foolishly in order to write wisely – non è vero?" Most of us would answer this little question in the negative, but, buried as it is in the midst of Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, it would seem to have been something like Fitzgerald's artistic manifesto in those novels that preceded it.
Only when she had worked out a quite different course did her work achieve the crystalline, and seemingly effortless, perfection of the two late masterpieces, The Beginning of Spring and The Blue Flower. In The Beginning of Spring she manages to write something like an epic in the form of a novella. However one adds up the ingredients in the recipe – a Lunn Poly trip to Russia, a reading of Thomas Mann and Chekhov, a conscientious bit of research into the topography of pre-revolutionary Moscow — it is hard not to resort to the word "genius" when you savour the final result. The Beginning of Spring takes up all the Fitzgerald themes of unspoken passion and profoundly unresolved emotions. Frank Reid is one of those hopeless, decent, emotionally clumsy Fitzgerald characters – almost indistinguishable as a character from the young science don in The Gate of Angels (1990), only he is an Englishman running the family printing business in Moscow. It soon becomes obvious to the reader that his wife Nellie has run away from him because she is in love with his much-trusted Tolstoyan assistant: just as it is obvious to us that Lisa Ivanovna, whom Frank engages to look after his children, and with whom he falls in love, is a Bolshevik. As with The Cherry Orchard, the impending doom of Russia itself seems bound up with the family tragicomedy. Frank notices almost nothing; the author – in that distinctive tone of voice which seems to say only half of what it wants to say – notices everything.
I'd guess that the book which enabled her to climb to a higher level was Thomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar, which uses similarly oblique methods to evoke the past, and another place. In her final book – as in her first, the Burne-Jones biography – she is confidently wired up to that most mysterious question: where does art come from? Where, that is, in a person's soul? Fitzgerald claimed that she knew nothing of the German poet Novalis, and his hopeless love for a child-bride who died, beyond what she had discovered from reading (another favourite of hers) George MacDonald. She claimed she had no better than schoolgirl German. Perhaps these protestations were true? But the resulting jewel, which is funny and achingly sad in equal measure, is that almost unknown thing in literary history, a perfect work of fiction.
Hermione Lee is not to be blamed for failing to write a Penelope Fitzgerald-style biography. She has written, instead, a very readable and honest account of the incomprehensible facts. Fitzgerald emerges as a lovable (occasionally maddening) mystery. Fitzgerald told us things without spelling them out. Lee is a mortal, and so she has to spell things out, in a way which does not always catch fire. We are told that religion was of primary importance (C of E) – but we only smell, through a grandchild's nostrils, the fry-up, after granny has returned from the early service in Muswell Hill. There is no word about Fitzgerald's faith or her prayers. We are told that she really loved poor old Desmond. But never once do we sense what it was like when they were alone together. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life is the sort of tribute which is nowadays paid by publishers, by professors, by the literary world, when a considerable figure leaves us. And the workmanlike tribute persuades us – who needed no persuading – that Fitzgerald was one of the finest writers of her time, perhaps of all her contemporaries in Britain, the one who will longest endure.
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