This piece about Penelope Fitzgerald, which coincides with the publication of her collected letters, So I Have Thought of You, appears this week in Time Out London. The piece isn’t on their website yet. When it is, I’ll add a link here.
[Incidentally, a much more comprehensive reappraisal of Fitzgerald's fiction by Julian Barnes appeared in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago.]
In his introduction to her collected letters, Penelope Fitzgerald’s son-in-law Terence Dooley observes that she rarely spoke or wrote much about her fiction. And what she did say, either to friends or colleagues, was mostly (and probably deliberately) ‘misleading’. There’s a good deal of correspondence in So I Have Thought of You about her various biographical projects, and much transacting of book business (suggestions for dust jackets sent to publishers; complaints about publishers sent to long-suffering friends, and so on) – but very little about her novels, the first of which, The Golden Child (a ‘mystery story’ set in the British Museum), was published in 1977, when Fitzgerald was 60.
However, there are a handful of letters in which she does attempt a self-reckoning of sorts. Writing to Colin Haycraft, her editor at Duckworth, who published her first two works of fiction, Fitzgerald recalls that ‘one of the first pieces of advice you ever gave me was to write short novels because you didn’t believe people wanted to read long ones, and I’m very glad I took it.’ This is characteristically flattering of her correspondent, since it’s clear that her taste for brevity and concision in fact ran very deep. In 1980, after she’d moved from Duckworth to Collins, Fitzgerald wrote apologetically to her new editor Richard Ollard: ‘I’m afraid … that it’s not in my nature to be spectacular or panoramic’.
She needn’t have apologised, of course: her aversion to the ‘spectacular’ had served her well the previous year, when her third novel, Offshore, won the Booker Prize. Like all her books, Offshore is a miracle of compressed emotional power and moral intelligence (it runs to a little under 140 pages in paperback). It is set in the early 1960s by the Thames, in the bohemian squalor of Battersea Reach, among houseboat dwellers cut off from their neighbours on dry land not just by their choice of abode but also by their failure to secure ‘sensible occupations’. (Typically for characters in a Fitzgerald novel, the denizens of Battersea Reach experience this failure as something inexplicable and ‘distressing to themselves’; something that befalls them as if by fate.)
The letters are also a reminder that Fitzgerald was a great wit, and indeed Offshore hums with understated humour. Early in the novel, for instance, we are told that at residents’ meetings the inhabitants of each houseboat are addressed, in accordance with naval protocol, by the name of their vessel. One recent arrival changes the name of his boat in order to avoid being known as ‘Dondeschiepolschuygen IV’.
But the dominant note is one of ‘sodden melancholy’, struck principally by the tribulations of Nenna James, who has spent the last of her savings on the barely river-worthy ‘Grace’ (also the name of the houseboat Fitzgerald lived on with her husband in the ’60s). In the novel’s climactic scene, Nenna takes several buses from Chelsea to Stoke Newington, where her estranged husband is living (a journey that Fitzgerald manages to make seem like an odyssey).
One critic has described Nenna’s confrontation with her husband as ‘explosive’, though that’s not quite right. The scene is certainly terrible and unsettling, but what’s most striking about it is what Fitzgerald leaves out. Few other novelists when writing it would have had Nenna say just two words to her husband in the heat of the battle: ‘please give’. All she wants is the ‘sensation of being given to’. As Fitzgerald put it later: ‘One of the privileges of dialogue is silence.’
The experience of winning of the Booker with Offshore wasn’t an altogether happy one for Fitzgerald. In a letter to Francis King, she recounts drily how, at the awards dinner, the man from the Evening Standard had told her that everyone was expecting V.S. Naipaul to win, and that they’d already written their pieces on that basis.
Chastened but undeterred, Fitzgerald wrote two more novels (Human Voices and At Freddie’s) in which she mined her own life for raw material, before embarking on the final stage of her fictional career with Innocence, published in 1986. Here the setting is not domestic and contemporary, but foreign and historical: Florence in the 1950s, with flashbacks to the 1930s and walk-on parts for real figures, including the Italian Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by the Fascists.
Similarly, in Fitzgerald’s final novel The Blue Flower (1995), based on the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as the German Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis, Goethe, Fichte and the Schlegels all make an appearance. Yet, as the critic Frank Kermode (one of Fitzgerald’s keenest and most careful readers) has pointed out, she moves these historical personages around without their presence ever seeming forced or intrusive.
Fitzgerald’s late novels leave us admiring her not for how much she knew (though she knew a lot – about salt mining in 18th-century Saxony, for instance, or the post-war economic miracle in Italy) but for the way she was able to inhabit the periods and places she had researched. And for all their compacted weight of historical detail, they have the same mysterious, oblique economy as the earlier books.
In The Blue Flower, the crucial encounter between Hardenberg and the twelve year-old Sophie von Kühn, with whom he will become engaged, is announced almost by omission. At the end of one chapter, we see Sophie for the first time, standing at a window with her back to the assembled company. And at the beginning of the next, Friedrich says simply, ‘Something has happened.’
‘I always feel,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘that the reader is insulted by being told too much.’