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

Offshore was enthusiastically reviewed, shortlisted for the Booker, and then, against all expectations, won it. But what should have been a triumph had decidedly mixed results.

The Booker has an honourable reputation for selecting the best and most interesting novels of the year, even if they don’t always win, and it is now a venerable and respected institution, guaranteeing a (sometimes vast) increase in sales for the winner, and boosting reputations; but that only began to happen a year or so after Penelope won. Then, shamefully, in the early years when the prize ceremony received fairly shoddy television coverage, the lucky six authors shortlisted, whose only sin was to have written praiseworthy novels, were lined up as in a coconut shy to be insulted by media pundits, who gave no very convincing impression of having read the books in question. That year the firm favourite was A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul, a fine novel that Penelope later recommended for another prize. It would have been an equally worthy winner, but it is said, with truth, that judging literary competitions is like comparing gazelles with tigers. Journalists had already written their pieces, and were affronted by not even having heard, in most cases, of Penelope. What followed could be described as a field day of ignorant and exceedingly unfair indignation. The Critics on Radio 3 (which had praised The Bookshop to the skies), called the result a disgrace and a very bad day for modern fiction, or something of the kind. ‘When I got to the Book Programme, soaking wet because I’d had to be photographed on a bale of rope on the Embankment, R[obert] Robinson was in a very bad temper and complained to his programme executive "who are these people, you promised me they were going to be the losers?"’ wrote Penelope to Francis King. ‘I’ll never forget the Book Programme,’ Penelope wrote to Richard Ollard; ‘I was delighted to hear that you are printing off a few more Offshores. I thought it had got shipwrecked altogether by so many unpleasant remarks.’

It may have set back her career. Her next two novels, though liked, did not receive the appreciation they deserved. Hasty readers and reviewers missed the depths of Human Voices and At Freddie’s: it was too easy to take them only for the dazzling entertainments that in one sense they are. Her ellipses and puzzles often led them to wonder if she had left something out, if the apparent holes in her plots were accidental, but really she intended her readers to work, to solve the mysteries the stories hinge on for themselves. She tried to define Human Voices for the blurb that Richard Ollard was writing, and makes clear its complexity:

It is really about the love-hate relationship between 2 of the eccentrics on whom the BBC depended, and about love, jealousy, death, child-birth in Broadcasting House and the crises that go on to produce the 9 o’clock news on which the whole nation relied during the war years, heartbreak &c, and also about this truth telling business.

The original title, ‘Ten Seconds From Now’, seemed only to refer to the urgency and danger of the times, to the effort of the whole nation to avert evil by upholding the truth, in which Penelope participated as a programmes assistant at the BBC. The preferred title, ‘Human Voices’, taken from Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, is apt both in its reference to the disembodied broadcasters, and to the pain of young love: for ‘human voices wake us and we drown’. Another poem also underlies the book, as she points out helpfully or unhelpfully to Ollard in the same letter: ‘(Incidentally, as no-one reads Heine I suppose no-one will understand the name Asra, but that’s by the way.)’ Annie Asra, the heroine of Human Voices, like all Penelope’s female protagonists, represents her in some aspects. Heine’s poem ‘Der Asra’ is about a slave slowly dying for love of his mistress. All his tribe, the Asra, in fact die if they fall in love, and Annie is clearly a member of it. The unsuitability of the people we fall in love with is one of Penelope’s themes. She goes so far as to wonder, in one of her novels, whether men and women are ever quite the right thing for each other. However, she certainly believed in love unto death.

At Freddie’s was originally called ‘What! Are They Children?’, but although the precocious boy actors are its ultimate focus, it is also about the theatre and its monstres sacrés, unhappy love, life’s casualties, and the impossibility of teaching children what they don’t require to know, what they don’t already intuit as necessary to them. The teachers in the novel, Pierce and Hannah, quickly realise that it is only their support and kindness that their charges need. It is interesting that their backgrounds in some respects mirror Desmond’s and Penelope’s. Pierce is an Irish Catholic; Hannah is from Ulster (where the Knoxes have their roots). Shakespeare’s ‘King John’, with its murder of innocents, is the play being rehearsed in the book, for Freddie is a serious headmistress. The character derives from Miss Freeston, head not of Italia Conti, where Penelope began her teaching in the early 1960s, but of Westminster Tutors, the eccentric Oxbridge crammer where she was still teaching. However Freddie is given some of the traits and fearsome reputation of Lilian Baylis, the much-loved dragon of the Old Vic, the theatre that flew the flag for Shakespeare in London for so many years.

Penelope wrote to Richard Ollard about the cover design for At Freddie’s:

I wanted a high wall with a broken basket of fruit at the bottom of it, having evidently fallen, one of the Covent Garden baskets. That gives some movement, because it’s evidently fallen from somewhere. I did think of the stage children as to some extent expendable products, like the fruit.

Ollard, the fourth publisher to do so, politely turned down ‘The Poetry Bookshop’ project four times. In the face of Penelope’s lively persistence, which makes for entertaining reading, and with the reduction of its focus to a study of the life of Charlotte Mew, and how it gave rise to her few, haunting poems, in the end he gracefully bowed to the inevitable. She wrote to him as the publication date neared:

the interesting things about CMew are that: 1. she was a poet, otherwise I shouldn’t bother to write about her 2. she was a lesbian 3. she was unhappy 4. she has a curious lifespan as a writer, from the nineties to the 1920s…I fear none of the papers would be interested in an extract about a lesbian who didn’t make it…The interest, to me, is that she’s a divided personality who had to produce so many versions of herself at the same time. Perhaps we all do.

Chris Carduff, in his first assignment as an editor, oversaw the Addison Wesley edition in the US, and sensibly and logically enriched it with a selection of Mew’s poems.

It is curious how many successful writers have been drawn to write wonderful books about unsuccessful ones. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (but she had so few) is a tragic, deeply literary book, of similar length and structure to her novels. It was her last biography. From now on, nonetheless, all her fiction would include people who had really existed. The two worlds were merging.

In the letters to Richard Ollard, as befitted their flourishing friendship, she discussed freely the upheavals in her life provoked by the decision of my wife and myself to move to the country and bring up our children there. Now she would live between Somerset and London. In Theale she gardened, helped sometimes with Fergus (though she wasn’t terribly good with babies and toddlers; she preferred children to have reached the age of reason), relaxed as much as she ever did, and we hoped that she would be able to write. However she found that ‘I personally can only write in London, I love the noise and squalor and the perpetual distractions and the temptation to take an aircraft somewhere else’, and so Jean Fisher helped her to find a base, at 76 Clifton Hill, St John’s Wood, in the house of a friend of a friend where she lived in ‘a kind of attic, overlooking the tree-tops, with gold wallpaper’. This arrangement worked well until 1987, when her work for the writers’ association PEN International and the Arts Council, her research at the British Museum reading room for her books, and her tireless reviewing, kept her more and more in London, and her daughter Maria and son-in-law John generously agreed to convert the coachhouse of their new house in Bishop’s Road, Highgate for her. They looked after her there for the rest of her life.

During the years at Clifton Hill she was taking her writing in a new direction. An examination of her manuscripts in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas seems to indicate that, however intense the thought and technique that went into them, her first four novels almost wrote themselves. Her pure fiction is entrancing, but now she was attempting to combine this with the novel of ideas, the metaphysical novel. She had been considering writing about Italy, and specifically Florence, for a decade, the book that after many evolutions became Innocence. An early version of the Ridolfis appears in a first draft, which was to have been about the great Florentine flood, and might even have been intended to be a detective story. It is Francis King she credits with putting her on track: ‘you’ll hardly remember, having been to so many other places since, that you told me the story of the Italian family and their dwarfs yourself’. This cruel legend or parable from the 1560s is retold by Penelope with a wealth of vivid apparently historical detail as the first chapter of Innocence, shedding its mysterious light and darkness over the Shakespearean comedy of tangled loves, with the rumbling of politics beneath, set in a 1950s Italy seemingly known and recreated from within. The Ridolfis of those earlier days were midgets. When their daughter’s companion starts outgrowing her her legs must be cut off at the knees.

The twentieth-century Ridolfis retain ‘a tendency to rash decisions, perhaps always intended to ensure other people’s happiness’. Stuart Proffitt, who took over as her editor on Richard Ollard’s retirement, suggested ‘Happiness’ as a title, but Penelope remarked that the novel could as easily be called ‘Unhappiness’. The happiness in question is marital. Constant misunderstandings drive the lovers, Chiara and Salvatore, together and apart. By the end their young stormy marriage seems to have been saved by a hair’s breadth, to be provisionally permanent. Salvatore throws up his hands:

‘What’s to become of us? We can’t go on like this.’

‘Yes, we can go on like this. We can go on exactly like this for the rest of our lives.’

As well as telling a story, Penelope now sought to evoke a culture, and an historical period. Every page gives evidence of a lightly worn, instructive and relevant erudition: about viticulture, law, medicine, architecture, the cinema, fashion, economics, and, above all, politics. For Gramsci, the influential communist reformer who wrote of the ethical society, is the historical figure introduced here, his ideas appealing to Penelope in much the same way as did those of William Morris. Lastly, one should point out the striking, if idealised, resemblance of Chiara to Penelope herself, particularly in the cover-picture she chose for Innocence, one of Pontormo’s angels, from his Annunciation. The virtues of her new method were immediately recognised by the critics, and her reputation began to grow: she was again shortlisted for the Booker, the third of her four novels to be so honoured.

Through vicissitudes of archive-keeping, the letters to Stuart Proffitt about this and her next two novels have (I hope temporarily) disappeared. However, for The Beginning of Spring, her next novel, we do have the letters to Harvey Pitcher, author of The Smiths of Moscow, credited by Penelope as having been vital to her research. These, like many of the letters in the ‘Writing’ section, show how meticulous and indefatigable she was in this aspect of her work, with what a sense of adventure and enjoyment she undertook it. On one level The Beginning of Spring, first called Nellie and Lisa, is once again a brilliant tragicomedy of marital misunderstanding, memorable like Offshore for its depiction of children not unlike her own. The spring is also the Russian revolutionary spring, for she chose historical periods, which seemed to promise change, emancipation and spiritual rebirth. The novel’s first conception also dates back at least a decade. In Texas is a notebook entitled The Greenhouse, with an early draft of the story of the English expatriate printer which takes the firm on into the May Revolution itself, but this proved unworkable. Pitcher’s book and The Times’ Russian Supplements of the period provide the realistic detail, but the uncanny imaginative power that makes a countrified chaotic Moscow almost tangible surely springs from a deep knowledge of and affinity with Russian literature, especially the Tolstoy of Resurrection and Master and Man, whose idiosyncratic Christian socialism infuses the novel. More than this, in The Beginning of Spring, uninsistently, symbolically, mysteriously, the presence of the supernatural is felt, and it will continue to startle and unsettle (as do the ghosts of the future in the birch wood here) in her last two novels and late stories.

Her next novel, The Gate of Angels, is also set in the first decade of last century, on the cusp of the modern era. It revolves around an accident, which may have been caused by a ghost, and culminates in a miracle. Fred, the Cambridge scientist, and Daisy, the London nurse down on her luck, live in minutely recreated social spheres which are set never to collide. Yet ‘Chance is one of the manifestations of God’s will’ and they wake up naked in a Samaritan stranger’s bedroom, having been knocked off their bicycles by a carter who has vanished into thin air. (This incident was a real one, recounted in Edward Burne-Jones.) Penelope is at her most formally experimental and teasing in her late fiction, but she gave some clues as to the interpretation of this novel to an enquiring reader, Bridget Nichols:

The Gate of Angels is about the questions of faith and generosity…Dr Matthews is a portrait of Monty James. I set my novel in the Cambridge of 1912 because that was the height of the so-called ‘body/mind controversy’, with the scientists of the Cavendish in controversy with professing Christians, championed by James who was then Provost of Kings.

Dr Matthews, like M. R. James, tells ghost stories, and, in one of Penelope’s intertextual serious games, tells one here to explain the bicycle accident to himself by means of a local haunting. He adds plausibility to it, by seeming to ground it in his own youthful experience, telling it in the first person, something James never did. ‘Do I believe in such things?’ Matthews asks himself, and goes on: ‘Well, I am prepared to consider the evidence, and accept it if I am satisfied.’ That places retain the evil that was done in them, and that apparently ordinary people, like Daisy, for whom the gate of Angels opens, may have some healing force of goodness in them, these were certainly things that Penelope believed. She also wants us to accept the miraculous as part of life.

The Gate of Angels was the fourth of Penelope’s books to be shortlisted for the Booker, and it was on three other shortlists. Though it did not win, it received wonderful reviews, especially from other writers, and sold very well. Much was now expected of her. It was extraordinary enough to have started on a literary career so late, to have run it entirely on her own terms, only writing what she chose, never faltering either in excellence or variety; but perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was that her next and last novel, published when she was seventy-eight, should have been generally hailed as her masterpiece, and, despite its complexity and intellectual scope, become a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic.

If The Blue Flower is certainly a novel and a work of the imagination, it is a most original one in that its hero and most of its characters were real people, yet it transcends the genres of biography and historical fiction: it seems to be an enquiry into what it means to be alive. With imperfect German but great concentration on what was germane to her artistic purposes, Penelope studied Mähl and Samuel’s Complete Works, Diaries, and Letters (including letters to him) of Novalis, the Romantic poet. It took her two years, and gave her ample material to write the story of his tragically curtailed life, if that had been her intention, but it wasn’t. What fascinated her was the blue flower itself. She is on record as saying that in an ideal life she wouldn’t have gone to Oxford to read English, but would have become an artist. Much of her writing in World Review (and her first book, Burne-Jones) was on art. In the ‘70s, one of her many projects was a book on flower symbolism in the original pre-Raphael painters of the Quattrocento. In this she saw a Christian mysticism that went to the heart of her beliefs. It appears from the very chaotic drafts of The Blue Flower in her archive in Texas (where also is the folder on flower symbolism) that she wanted to incorporate the anachronical story of the discovery of the blue poppy in the high Himalayas in the early twentieth century by Colonel Eric Bailey – from whom it derives its botanical name, Meconopsis Baileyi – and a mysterious Jesuit priest. All this is the pollen that led her to the poet Novalis and his incomplete mystical novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the beginning of which she quotes teasingly in the wonderful seventeenth chapter ‘What is the Meaning?’: ‘…I long to see the blue flower…’ In Novalis, the flower is a remnant of the golden age when plants and animals spoke and told their secrets to mankind. In a dream he sees it mutate into a sweet girl’s face: ‘Du hast das Wunder der Welt gesehen.’ You have seen the wonder of the world.

Fritz, the young poet who has not yet rechristened himself, but is already for those around him a genius in whose presence ‘everything is illuminated’, finds his meaning and wisdom in Sophie, an absolutely ordinary Saxon girl, yet one who has moral grace, whose likeness cannot be taken, who is indefinable. If love is the answer to the first question expressed as a chapter-heading, how is it altered by the second: ‘What is pain?’ Sophie has ‘opened the door’ to Fritz, but now she succumbs to tuberculosis, undergoes appalling operations without anaesthetic, dies. Fritz is of little comfort or practical help to her during this time, though after her death he takes the symbolic name Novalis and writes his great philosophical poem Hymns to the Night in her memory.

Almost incidentally to its high themes, The Blue Flower recreates the whole fabric of life in eighteenth-century Prussia, food and drink, taxes and laws, roads, landscape, seasons, philosophy and salt mining, and establishes the characters of the twenty or so people closest to Fritz in the course of his bildung, with their own concerns and point of view, characters at every stage of development, so that for every reader there is one who speaks to his or her heart. Inexplicably it missed every British prize list when it came out in 1995, but the reviews were outstanding, again especially from other writers, and in the end-of-year round-ups it was book of the year, with 25 mentions, and went on to sell 25,000 copies in hardback.

Stuart Proffitt, Penelope’s editor for her last four novels, did much to promote and advance her career, and her gratitude to him (and their warm friendship) is evident in the letters that survive. Her dream had been to be published in paperback, and this was realised with the advent of Collins’ Flamingo imprint. It meant even more to her to see a stranger reading one of her books, and laughing at one of her jokes on the tube – a modest ambition perhaps, but one achieved. Her letters to Stuart demonstrate his devotion and kindness. She was distressed when he felt obliged to leave HarperCollins on a matter of principle not unconnected with the new owner. Still, Flamingo’s excellent care of her continued under the new team of Philip Gwyn-Jones, Karen Duffy and Mandy Kirkby. They found time to escort her to the readings, signings, events and festivals, which she was becoming too frail, and would have been too shy, to attend alone. Another devoted editor who was to achieve much for her now came back into her life.

Several publishers, including the redoubtable Nan Talese at Doubleday, had already attempted to ‘break’ her in America, without great success. It was feared, and Penelope herself thought, that she was ‘too British’. Chris Carduff had returned to publishing after some years spent editing The New Criterion, and was now employed at the Boston firm of Houghton Mifflin. He persuaded his boss, Janet Silver, to publish The Blue Flower in the US in 1997. It received a most enthusiastic and erudite review from Michael Hoffman, the lead and front cover of the New York Times Books section. That year for the first time the National Book Critics Circle Award was opened to foreign authors and Penelope won it, beating Roth’s American Pastoral, DeLillo’s Underworld and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. She particularly appreciated winning this prize, as it is judged by 700 book reviewers. There was some grumbling, as at her Booker Prize, for here again she was an unknown David against Goliaths, but it was politer, and soon to be silenced by a chorus of praise. The Blue Flower went on to sell 100,000 copies, and all her other novels followed it into print in America, permitting a timely retrospective of her career. Each of her books was admiringly reviewed as somebody’s favourite. The Bookshop, in particular, after twenty years, but recapturing the 1950s, was now recognised as a British classic.

In fact her novels had brought back all the periods of her active non-writing life, of her long literary silence. Human Voices described her young woman’s war service at the BBC, and the unique role that institution played in the upholding of truth and the national spirit in those years; Innocence recalled the 1950s, her young married years, when she was publishing Alberto Moravia and the younger Italian writers in World Review; The Bookshop, the failure of her early literary hopes and experiment in country-living in the late 1950s; Offshore, so redolent of the early 1960s and London’s river, her lowest point; At Freddie’s, her first teaching job, and the London stage in the days before the National Theatre, when, incidentally, she was beginning her self-apprenticeship to become a writer. Neither should her last three ‘historical’ novels, including The Blue Flower, be assumed to be free of autobiographical elements: Nellie in The Beginning of Spring, Daisy in The Gate of Angels, Fritz’s mother, all have aspects of Penelope, and her child characters always owe much to her own children. In choosing her periods she was chiefly guided, as she declared in interviews, by the wish to write of moments of optimism and ideological ferment, ‘when people really thought things might get better’, when the debates between science and religion, revolution and the unalterable, had not yet apparently ended in atomic bombs, tyranny and unbelief.

From the first, as we see everywhere in these letters, Penelope was most conscientious in undertaking the duties inherent in being a writer of reputation. Though she never enjoyed committees, she worked for PEN, the Arts Council, and later became Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature. A cause near her heart was that biographers should be recognised by grant-awarding bodies as creative writers. She was successful in fighting for this, as in her energetic support of Public Lending Right, which very belatedly ensured that writers were paid for the lending-out of their books by libraries. Her friendships with Francis King, Sybille Bedford and Michael Holroyd originated in this work. She met J. L. Carr, Thomas Hinde, Edward Blishen and A. L. Barker (known as Pat, author of short stories of fine sensibility, not to be confused with the equally estimable novelist Pat Barker) through her tutoring of fiction courses for the Arvon Foundation. She encouraged and advanced the careers of other writers not only through her tireless reviewing (there was almost no English paper she didn’t write for, reviewing regularly for the Evening Standard, the London Review of Books, the TLS, the Tablet, the New York Times and the Washington Post) but also by judging for most of the literary prizes, biography, poetry and fiction, including, twice, the Booker. She argued fiercely for Roddy Doyle’s The Van, and Magnus Mills’ The Restraint of Beasts, managing to get them both onto the respective shortlists. Among other young writers she championed were Glyn Maxwell, Candia McWilliam and Claire Messud. Among those who reviewed her, or whom she reviewed, and who are represented in this collection are Hilary Mantel, the biographer Richard Holmes and Sir Frank Kermode.