So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope kept four close friends from her childhood and youth: Maryllis Conder (’Willie’), Jeanie Fisher (later Lady Talbot), Rachel Hichens and Janet Probert. Marriage, child-rearing, work and geographical distance separated them for long years after the war, but Jeanie and Maryllis in particular became a great support to her in her widowhood.

‘Your mother has been my dearest friend,’ wrote Willie to Maria. They met at Wycombe Abbey, ‘a terrible place’, as Penelope remembered it. She was thinking of its aping of boys’ boarding schools, the sport, the cricket, the rituals, but it was principally terrible to both of them because of their home-sickness: they cried themselves to sleep for the first three weeks of every term. English Literature, however, was inspiringly taught (’under Daisy’) and was a shared consolation. They would both go on to study it at Oxford, though Penelope’s great enthusiasm was Art and Maryllis’s Music. They sat together in class, laughed at the same absurdities, and Mops (as Penelope was always known to friends) would help Willie with her essays. At the end of their last term at Wycombe, Penelope’s mother, Christina, died. Her father, Evoe, was too grief-stricken to speak of her, and she went to stay with Maryllis and her family in Devon. ‘It was a painful visit,’ Maryllis said, ‘but she told me later that it had helped her.’ During the war, as young women, they would meet unfailingly every week for lunch. ‘How clearly I can see her walking down Sloane St with me in her cherry coat.’

It is a strange thing that some good friends (and even family members) don’t always welcome the transformation of a person known so well into a successful writer, almost as if they had been hiding something from them and had now to be seen in a different light. Maryllis emphatically didn’t fall into this category, but devoted a corner of her study to Penelope’s books and drawings, her idiosyncratic Christmas cards which gave such pleasure. She also kept a selection of her letters (’in my Mops letters file box’), which covers the last twenty-five years of her life. ‘You know what a wonderful letter-writer she was.’

Willie and her husband Mike had restored a beautiful small Jacobean manor house, ‘Terry Bank’, near Kirkby Lonsdale. It had always been in the Conder family and still retains some of its original furniture. It is a tranquil place in a serene setting. Here, or to their converted lighthouse on Alderney, they invited Penelope every year. ‘We had some very happy times together, unforgettable’. In the dramatic hillside garden they created on the bank behind the house they planted the Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconopsis baileyi: The Blue Flower) in her honour. The letters provide a remarkable record of friendship and a continuing conversation. They discuss their children and grandchildren, plantings in their gardens. There is the occasional glimpse of Penelope’s busy literary career. They sympathise with each other over their ailments. Maryllis wrote to Tina after Penelope’s death that her mother had appeared to her at night in her room to console her and to tell her not to worry. It sounds the sort of thing she would do.

Another loving friendship of a whole life is detailed in the letters to Rachel Hichens (and her daughter Elizabeth Barnet, Penelope’s goddaughter). Each married a Cornish vicar, and they were and are rich in good works in a way with which Penelope had almost complete sympathy, only regretting that she couldn’t match it herself. Rachel was the daughter of the writer Alfred Ollivant. She and Penelope met through their mothers’ friendship, in Hampstead, when they were both about six years old. She told her daughter that she believed Penelope’s childhood to have been overshadowed by her mother’s illness. She worked at Bletchley Park during the war, where Dillwyn Knox was working on breaking the German codes. (He often tried to recruit his niece to help him, but unsuccessfully.) After both women married, they saw each other only occasionally, but Elizabeth often stayed with her godmother in London as a young woman, and found her and her family ‘so interesting’.

Mary Knox, Penelope’s stepmother (and illustrator of Mary Poppins, daughter of E. H. Shepard, illustrator of Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows) was only seven years older than Penelope, something that might have been resented, but wasn’t. They were frequent companions, so that letters were not really necessary. Nonetheless, many were written, though sadly only a few have survived. I hope they show how dear she was to Penelope, and to all the family.

These collections, which I am most grateful to have been given, depict Penelope as she was with those she loved, but inevitably those who ‘answered some of her long marvellous letters but kept none’ have had to be omitted: Jean Fisher, her friend from prep school, a source of practical kindness and help, as close a friend as Maryllis, if not quite such a kindred spirit – books were off limits; Rawle, her brother, to whom she pays tribute in A House of Air; finally her son, Valpy, of whom she writes in a never completed late essay, with perhaps rather whimsical and unjust exaggeration: ‘I’m not sure that he knows how to write a letter, and I think it possible that he doesn’t read them.’ She took the greatest possible pride in his achievements, as in those of her daughters. The last paragraph of her essay reads:

Once when we were living on the Suffolk coast and the mechanics of daily living had got altogether too much for me, Valpy who must have been about thirteen, looked at me thoughtfully and said he’d take me out for a row. We had a proofed canvas boat, the Little Emily, down on the marshes. She was anchored to a stake in the bank. Quite often one or other of the local boys would ‘borrow’ her and leave her wherever they felt like it. We had to go looking for her in the maze of reeds and narrow waterways. However, that afternoon she was lying patiently in her proper place. We got in and Valpy rowed for an hour or so under the immense shining East Coast sky, a watercolours sky. We went as far as the old pumping mill, through great banks of flowering sedge with grey leaves as sharp as saws. We rowed back, tied up, took out the rowlocks and walked home without saying anything, because nothing needed to be said. I felt more at peace then I think than I had ever done before.

II: Writing

For someone who was not at all business-like, Penelope managed her literary career decisively and with acumen. She would never employ an agent, and money is rarely mentioned in these letters. She was concerned first that her projects would be published, then that the books would look right, be error-free, reviewed, read and understood. About her writing she kept her own counsel, but she relied on her editors for much reassurance, help, advice and friendship. In finding four publishers in as many years (this was necessitated by the scope of her interests, and her shifts between the genres) she had only her talent and persistence to recommend her. She was probably introduced to Michael Joseph, who published her first book, Edward Burne-Jones, by Jean Fisher, whose cousin was the managing director of the firm. By a lucky coincidence, she had printed the first story of Raleigh Trevelyan, the editor who first read her biography, in her magazine World Review in the early ‘50s. They admired each other’s writing and became friends. Sadly, publishers’ archives are parlously preserved in these days, and I haven’t been able to trace any of her letters to him. The book’s status is an awkward one, because, as Penelope remarks, as a non-member of the art history establishment she wasn’t really allowed to have written it. Literary biographies are usually written about writers. It was patchily but well reviewed and, despite remaining the standard work on its subject, since no-one has discovered more about Burne-Jones, nor written as entertainingly about his loves and sorrows, nor with such enthusiasm and skill about his art, it is nonetheless the least read of her books, the only one now out of print, and never to have been available in America. This is a pity, for its non-readers have missed many wonderful vivid scenes, as when Robert Browning, woken by his geese, sees from his windows Burne-Jones desperately trying to prevent his mistress-muse, Mary Zambaco, from throwing herself off the bridge over the Regents Canal. Penelope’s correspondence with the eminent American Burne-Jones scholar, Mary Lago, shows like minds, whose interest in one subject draws them on and outwards, at the most unexpected tangent, to the next. The seeds of several of her later projects are in this vast, living, late-Victorian world.

The biography, though, didn’t sell, and her next project didn’t sound any more commercial to the rather middlebrow publishing house of Michael Joseph (as Raleigh Trevelyan recently recalled, they preferred to publish books about horses and dogs). It was politely turned down. But there were good reasons to believe Macmillan might be interested in The Knox Brothers, for Harold Macmillan had been much influenced by the Catholic chaplain, Ronald Knox, as an undergraduate at Oxford, and they always remained friends. He appears in the book as ‘C’. Harold Macmillan’s letter of congratulations to Penelope is most touching: ‘you have brought out marvellously well the characteristics of these remarkable men…you have made it all so living and, to me, in my old age deeply moving’.

The first of the revealing sets of letters to editors that form the core of this book is to Richard Garnett at Macmillan: ‘All writers are intimidated by all publishers,’ she remarked to him, and he sounds more intimidating than most, though Penelope politely stood up to him, in part by quoting his brusqueries back to him: ‘It worried me terribly when you told me I was only an amateur writer, and I asked myself how many books do you have to write and how many semi-colons do you have to discard before you lose amateur status.’ And again: ‘I recall that my heart sank when you said "I have the right to expect accuracy".’ Garnett was a scrupulous editor, but Penelope won most of the skirmishes over accuracy, even over how best to explain the complex workings of the Enigma decoding machine.

To describe the Knoxes’ many achievements required an overview of several quite distinct disciplines and milieux. Sons of Bishop Knox of Manchester, two of her uncles became priests of quite different stripe. Ronnie, much to his father’s distress, was the most public convert to Catholicism since Newman. A Christian apologist famous between the wars for his witness, he was much in demand in the newspapers and on the radio. He also wrote much-praised learned theological works, was renowned as a wit – his book Let Dons Delight being a particular favourite with the public – translated the Bible, and, while chaplain at Oxford, penned a best-selling series of detective novels. Wilfred, the least known of the brothers, was an Anglican chaplain at Cambridge, wrote profound devotional works, and inspired a generation of clergymen. Penelope’s father Eddie (or ‘Evoe’, his chosen sobriquet), the longest lived of the family, dying in 1970 at the age of ninety, made humour his speciality, writing graceful light verse and prose for Punch. Collected every Christmas in volume form, it was very popular. He edited the paper between the wars and brought it to its highest point of success and circulation. Dillwyn began as a brilliant classicist, and editor of the Herodas papyri. His subsequent career, though shrouded in mystery at the time (Penelope had to break the Official Secrets Act to write about it), has probably had the most long-lasting effects of all the Knoxes’ achievements, as he was instrumental in breaking the German codes in both wars. The letters to Mavis Batey, his assistant at Bletchley Park, illuminate this aspect of Penelope’s research.

She began the book a year or so after her father’s death, as a memorial to him and her uncles, rarely mentioning herself, and even then only as ‘the niece’ and ‘the daughter’. Her research had the good effect of reuniting her with her cousins, and igniting a warm friendship in particular with Oliver Knox, Dilly’s son, which would last until the end of her life. The Knox Brothers is a skilful and original family biography, interleaving four contrasting stories with a wealth of feeling and detail. It also captures a whole period of British life, the memory of which was beginning to fade in very different times. This was immediately appreciated, and, with its appearance, in 1977, Penelope could be said to have arrived. With her Burne-Jones she had repaid a debt to an artist who, in an epiphanic childhood moment, when the sun shone through his stained-glass window, ‘The Last Judgement’, in Birmingham cathedral, had awoken in her a sense of ideal beauty in art. In The Knox Brothers she captured a quality of mind, personality, temperament and values that defined her. When Francis King seemed to mock the brothers’ sometimes unremitting brilliance and sanctity, she replied ‘I loved them’. Now she need no longer consider herself the daughter or the niece. Free of that long shadow, she could delve into herself. She would essay fiction.

In fact she had already begun, but in a recognisably Knoxian mode, with a comic detective story, perhaps a false start. We do not know quite how she came to offer The Golden Child to Colin and Anna Haycraft at Duckworth, as the firm cannot trace the correspondence relating to the book, but she certainly, and soon, came to regret it. In September 1977 she wrote to Richard Garnett at Macmillan:

I thought quite well of the book at first but it’s now almost unintelligible, it was probably an improvement that the last chapters got lost, but then 4 characters and 1000s of words had to be cut to save paper, then the artwork got lost (by the printer this time) so we had to use my roughs and it looks pretty bad, but there you are, it doesn’t matter, and no-one will notice…everyone has to do the best they can.

But Duckworth were known for the ruthless editing of manuscripts, in the service of a house style: the nouvelle; indeed they were said to have improved Beryl Bainbridge’s first novels by this process. With Penelope it ever after rankled, yet even in its truncated form The Golden Child has much to amuse, with its egomaniacal establishment villains, and its unpromisingly named sleuth, Professor Untermensch. He, like Dilly Knox, is an expert decoder, in this case of Garamantian hieroglyphs, which Penelope draws herself, and with which she has a great deal of fun, as in their corresponding phonemes: Poo, Sog, Hak, Mum, etc.

If the book itself has to be decoded, it is not Penelope’s fault, and it was enjoyed when it appeared in 1977, in the same year as The Knox Brothers, though it was only mentioned in round-ups of crime fiction, a category to which it does not quite belong, as it has serious points to make about fakery, and about the corruption and denaturing of art through money and politics.

Penelope seemed to have taken the mutilation of The Golden Child philosophically, but she would have worse to contend with from Duckworth, as the correspondence with Colin Haycraft about her next book demonstrates all too clearly. With the money from The Knox Brothers she had embarked on a long-dreamt-of voyage to China. From the perspective of all that distance, she had the revelation all writers await. She saw as in a blinding light how to transmute the events of her own life into serious fiction. The first fruits of this earth-tremor was to be The Bookshop.

No woman is a hero to her son-in-law, and yet, when I first came across this book (till then unaware of its very existence) lying in boundproof form on her kitchen table, where it had been written, and took advantage of Penelope’s temporary absence to read it in one sitting, I did have a sense of ‘What? And in our house?’ I had no doubt that this was the real thing, and still feel grateful for the stolen privilege of being one of the first people to read it. Ever after that Penelope had an extra dimension of mystery to me. I immediately wrote her a note to express my amazed and delighted appreciation; it would have been too embarrassing to confess in person. I was touched, much later, to come across the never-referred-to note among her papers in Texas.

The Bookshop is not especially autobiographical, but it does seem to grind an axe in its depiction of Southwold as ‘Hardborough’, an exemplar of provincial mean spirit, the petty exercise of power, and philistinism. It is eloquent on the great beauty of the region, only spoilt for her by the loss, through the family’s insolvency, of ‘Blackshore’, their home, the large former oyster warehouse on the Hard, on which the bookshop was modelled. (But an earlier loss, the failure of her magazine World Review, which, in the end, ‘hadn’t been wanted’ must surely also underlie the book.) The real bookshop, in the High Street, remained open for many years, ably run by Mrs Neame, the old friend of the book’s dedication, whose assistant Penelope became, after her financial misfortunes. In reality, the family made a good many kind supportive friends there, though mainly among the intellectual bohemia of nearby Walberswick, including the Freuds, Sampsons and Fiennes. The moral atmosphere of the book, perhaps also some of the form (each chapter a scene), comes, as is mentioned in the blurb, from the Scènes de la Vie de Province of Balzac’s Human Comedy, which she studied with Tina, to help her with her ‘A’ level. The style, however, with its dry compassionate humour, could already be nobody but Penelope. It is still one of her most popular books, particularly abroad, in Europe and America, where it is seen as a very English classic. It has just been reissued in France with the misleading, but certainly striking, title L’Affaire Lolita. It was reviewed, in 1978, with respect and enthusiasm, and, with almost unheard-of good fortune for a first novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

With all of this Duckworth should have been well contented. However, with hindsight, Penelope should have thought better of entering a small pool of lady writers, all sharing some of the same traits, one of whom – Anna Haycraft (her pen-name Alice Thomas Ellis) – was also the nominal fiction editor. With Colin she got on, admiring his jovial eccentricity and classical scholarship. She had hoped he would accompany her to the Booker dinner, but he did not, adducing the improbable lack of a dinner jacket. Shortly after this it was inexplicably implied to Penelope that Duckworth had a surfeit of elegant nouvelles and she should return to crime-writing, which would sell better. Though we see Colin Haycraft hastily backtracking, the damage was done. She was deeply hurt. She would take her next novel to Collins. Here at last she fell on her feet: she had found a publishing home.

It is impossible to overstate Penelope’s energy and creativity in the late 1970s. There would be five novels in as many years, as well as an enormous amount of work on two biographies, each dear to her heart as projects, both of which she had to abandon, one from scruple, the other in the face of determined resistance from publishers. Although she would say little to friends or editors about her fiction (and that little misleading, for the novels must speak for themselves), the letters are full of fascinating detail about the unwritten biographies.

‘The Poetry Bookshop’ was the first conceived of these, and its intended theme is, if anything, more compelling and urgent today: the loss, through the unforeseen side-effects of modernism, of the lyric voice of English verse – the voice that spoke to the ordinary reader’s heart, the loss therefore (by now almost complete) of the mass audience for serious poetry. The book would have concerned itself with the rehabilitation of the Georgians, whose headquarters was at Harold and Alida Monro’s poetry bookshop in Devonshire Street (now Boswell Street) in Bloomsbury. Yeats, Frost, Edward Thomas, Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, even Eliot, all passed through its portals, but Penelope was especially interested in the minor figures: Monro himself, Anna Wickham, F. S. Flint and Charlotte Mew, with their, as she discovered, often tragic and tormented lives, who never quite made it, but each produced a handful of perfect lyrics. How one regrets this book, which she did not abandon until all four of her publishers had turned it down in succession. Yet fragments of it survive, first in the story of Harold Monro, in her introduction to J. Howard Woolmer’s scholarly bibliography of publications of the Poetry Bookshop, especially of its beautiful illustrated rhyme sheets, a treasured childhood memory of Penelope’s. Her letters to Woolmer trace the development of a warm transatlantic relationship between bookseller (albeit a very grand one) and collector, which becomes a meeting of minds as we see them sharing the details of their research. He most generously gave her some of the precious rhyme sheets when he realised she couldn’t afford them, and put her in the way of more money, most necessary to impecunious authors, by persuading her to sell her papers to Texas, and thus no doubt saving many of them, for she was modestly careless in such things.

To Richard Ollard, her great support and ally at Collins over the next years, we owe the eventual publication of the other fruit of ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ research: her wonderful dark biography Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, which reads so much like one of her novels. Ollard, like Raleigh Trevelyan also a distinguished writer, was senior literary editor at Collins, and perhaps the last of the ‘gentleman publishers’. They suited each other; she could rely on him. ‘You can always consult Richard if anything worries you,’ his assistant, Sarah, told Penelope. They became friends, as they remained to the end of her life. With him (as with several other correspondents, notably Francis King who gave her much encouragement) she discussed, in a spirit of high comedy, her difficulties and adventures in the preparation of her life of Leslie (L. P.) Hartley. The book, which sounded more promising than ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ to publishers, was still promised to Colin Haycraft, despite their rift.

What became of it? She had to overcome the implacable opposition of Lord David Cecil, Hartley’s literary executor, even to begin it. Cecil had been the love of Hartley’s life. Long married, he didn’t perhaps wish to acknowledge the basis of their youthful friendship. Anthony Powell kindly intervened to persuade him that Penelope would be the ideal person to tell Hartley’s story with the tact needed, and she worked hard on the book for three years from 1977. It wasn’t so much the gondoliers, the murderous, manipulative man-servants, the oceans of gin, the snobbery (all those duchesses), the extreme right-wing politics, the pot-shots at swans from his house on the River Avon, that dissuaded her from proceeding, but the affection she developed for his loving sister, Norah. How could she present the dissipation of his achievement of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the coarsening of his clear, careful voice (an echo of it is audible in The Bookshop, as Haycraft points out) in a good light? Could she betray the memory of their own friendship, of his support during her first literary career, her editorship of World Review, when she often published him, by the honest depiction of his long decline, all too visible in the desperately feeble novels and stories of his later years? She couldn’t, and wouldn’t. Somewhat wistfully, she gave up on the project in the early 1980s. These letters give a strong sense of what a biography it might have been.

The book she did deliver to Richard Ollard in 1979 was Offshore. Here one feels distinctly in Fitzgeraldland, or, in this case, afloat on the brackish, swirling, hardly benevolent waters of a great tidal river, uncertainly tethered to a land that has brought no luck. Though the characters couldn’t be more English, the tragicomedy of their fates (tragi-farce she called it) sounds notes more common in European fiction. It was sometimes painful to read for her family. All art, the adult characters invented or composite, there is much in it that was recognisably the case: ‘Grace’, the houseboat, probably bought for its name as much as its cheapness, appears as itself, as does Stripey the cat, and the two little girls are called Tina and Maria in the manuscript. Reality dances with imagination in a treacherous way, games are being played with remembered facts, though not with the feelings beneath them. In the third chapter, Nenna, who is as distanced from Penelope as she is like her, finds her thoughts becoming ‘a kind of perpetual magistrate’s hearing’ about her marriage and her motives for her actions. After many ordeals, the drama is resolved in irresolution. The boat never actually goes down.