The Blue Flower

The Blue Flower

Penelope Fitzgerald

From the reviews of The Blue Flower:

‘A minor miracle of sympathy and crispness’

Adam Mars-Jones, Guardian

‘An extraordinary imagining … an original masterpiece’

Hermione Lee, Financial Times

‘The Blue Flower is an utterly gripping and involving novel which lingers long in the mind. I know of no contemporary writer who more exactly fulfils the brief which Lord Grey of Fallodon drafted apropos of Jane Austen (‘‘With all these limitations you are to write, not only one novel, but several, which … shall be classed among the first rank of the novels written in your language in your country’’).

‘So how does she do it? Is it the style? To an extent, yes, but not in any obvious way. The prose is rapid, plain and unassuming, with a fondness for dry wit and familiar allocutions. There is little imagery and no recondite vocabulary. Obliquity, timing, and the virtues of omission and allusion are her secrets. Paragraphing bears no obvious relation to temporal or spatial co-ordinates. We flit from one point of time, one view and place, with the nonchalance of a ministering yet invisible spirit.

‘These are, in a sense, negative virtues, and this may be the key to the mystery. How many historical novelists seem to view the past like someone scanning a brochure of Tuscan villasina grey November, asa foreign country where they do things not just differently but more interestingly? And when real historical figures with a known fate and stature are involved, how hard not to fall into the fallacy of assuming that they and their contemporaries were either aware of or wholly unconcerned about the figures they would cut for us, backlit by the retrospective glow which posterity has bestowed on them. Penelope Fitzgerald does not just step safely through this minefield, she makes of it a dance arena in which not only the central characters but all their numerous siblings, relatives and friends come to tumultuous and convincing life. Her past is as present, this being as ‘‘unbearably light’’, its search for meaning as urgent and provisional, as our own.’

Michael Dibdin, Independent on Sunday

‘There are twenty perfectly competent novelists at work in Britain today, but only a handful producing what one could plausibly call works of literature. Of this handful, Penelope Fitzgerald possesses what one can only call the purest imagination. Her limpid, exact prose reflects an unwaveringly clear view of the human predicament. She seems to be one of those rare artists gifted with both the knowledge of how things are, and the skill to record what she knows with subtlety and devastating truthfulness.’

A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard

‘The tension between Fitzgerald’s cool and the alien turbulence of most of her characters adds piquancy … each one, however briefly he or she appears, is as visible and audible as the twigs scraping the windows. Fitzgerald tells you what they eat (goose, eel, cabbage, plums), what they read (if they read), and what they think about the French Revolution. It is fastidious, funny, sad, clever and very engaging.’

Gabriele Annan, TLS

‘She is an intelligent writer, superbly and unfailingly so. But her dry wit is also allied to a great talent for emotional sympathy. The disappointment of Karoline Just … is as terrible and as penetratingly understood as the humiliation of Chekhov’s Varya rummaging for galoshes while the cherry orchard changes hands. A wise and funny novel.’

Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

‘The life of Fritz von Hardenberg, the German romantic poet Novalis, might not seem a likely subject for Fitzgerald’s ironic gift. In fact, the cool examination of the poet’s grotesque family, all the minute historical details which are never laboured and always convincing, and the unsentimental, moving account of Fritz’s slightly absurd passions are all very beautifully done. Fitzgerald never seemsto try too hard; she never bullies the reader, but her dry, small-scale prose manages to produce large-scale emotional effects.’

Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

‘The Blue Flower is a model of what historical fiction can be at its best – when the radical otherness of other times is not merely acknowledged but made integral to the fictional experience. It's also Fitzgerald at her best – elegant, inventive, hilarious, unsparing. I adore this book.’

Jonathan Franzen

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

PRAISE

PREFACE BY HERMIONE LEE, ADVISORY EDITOR

INTRODUCTION

EPIGRAPH

1. WASHDAY

2. THE STUDY

3. THE BERNHARD

4. BERNHARD’S RED CAP

5. THE HISTORY OF FREIHERR HEINRICH VON HARDENBERG

6. UNCLE WILHELM

7. THE FREIHERR AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

8. IN JENA

9. AN INCIDENT IN STUDENT LIFE

10. A QUESTION OF MONEY

11. A DISAGREEMENT

12. THE SENSE OF IMMORTALITY

13. THE JUST FAMILY

14. FRITZ AT TENNSTEDT

15. JUSTEN

16. THE JENA CIRCLE

17. WHAT IS THE MEANING?

18. THE ROCKENTHIENS

19. A QUARTER OF AN HOUR

20. THE NATURE OF DESIRE

21. SNOW

22. NOW LET ME GET TO KNOW HER

23. I CAN’T COMPREHEND HER

24. THE BROTHERS

25. CHRISTMAS AT WEISSENFELS

26. THE MANDELSLOH

27. ERASMUS CALLS ON KAROLINE JUST

28. FROM SOPHIE’S DIARY, 1795

29. A SECOND READING

30. SOPHIE’S LIKENESS

31. I COULD NOT PAINT HER

32. THE WAY LEADS INWARDS

33. AT JENA

34. THE GARDEN-HOUSE

35. SOPHIE IS COLD THROUGH AND THROUGH

36. DR HOFRAT EBHARD

37. WHAT IS PAIN?

38. KAROLINE AT GRüNINGEN

39. THE QUARREL

40. HOW TO RUN A SALT MINE

41. SOPHIE AT FOURTEEN

42. THE FREIFRAU IN THE GARDEN

43. THE ENGAGEMENT PARTY

44. THE INTENDED

45. SHE MUST GO TO JENA

46. VISITORS

47. HOW PROFESSOR STARK MANAGED

48. TO SCHLÖBEN

49. AT THE ROSE

50. A DREAM

51. AUTUMN 1796

52. ERASMUS IS OF SERVICE

53. A VISIT TO MAGISTER KEGEL

54. ALGEBRA, LIKE LAUDANUM, DEADENS PAIN

55. MAGISTER KEGEL’S LESSON

AFTERWORD

AUTHOR’S NOTE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Penelope Fitzgerald

Preface by Hermione Lee, Advisory Editor

When Penelope Fitzgerald unexpectedly won the Booker Prize with Offshore, in 1979, at the age of sixty-three, she said to her friends: ‘I knew I was an outsider.’ The people she wrote about in her novels and biographies were outsiders, too: misfits, romantic artists, hopeful failures, misunderstood lovers, orphans and oddities. She was drawn to unsettled characters who lived on the edges. She wrote about the vulnerable and the unprivileged, children, women trying to cope on their own, gentle, muddled, unsuccessful men. Her view of the world was that it divided into ‘exterminators’ and ‘exterminatees’. She would say: ‘I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost.’ She was a humorous writer with a tragic sense of life.

Outsiders in literature were close to her heart, too. She was fond of underrated, idiosyncratic writers with distinctive voices, like the novelist J. L. Carr, or Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, or the remarkable and tragic poet Charlotte Mew. The publisher Virago’s enterprise of bringing neglected women writers back to life appealed to her, and under their imprint she championed the nineteenth-century novelist Margaret Oliphant. She enjoyed eccentrics like Stevie Smith. She liked writers, and people, who stood at an odd angle to the world. The child of an unusual, literary, middle-class English family, she inherited the Evangelical principles of her bishop grandfathers and the qualities of her Knox father and uncles: integrity, austerity, understatement, brilliance and a laconic, wry sense of humour.

She did not expect success, though she knew her own worth. Her writing career was not a usual one. She began publishing late in her life, around sixty, and in twenty years she published nine novels, three biographies and many essays and reviews. She changed publisher four times when she started publishing, before settling with Collins, and she never had an agent to look after her interests, though her publishers mostly became her friends and advocates. She was a dark horse, whose Booker Prize, with her third novel, was a surprise to everyone. But, by the end of her life, she had been short listed for it several times, had won a number of other British prizes, was a well-known figure on the literary scene, and became famous, at eighty, with the publication of The Blue Flower and its winning, in the United States, the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Yet she always had a quiet reputation. She was a novelist with a passionate following of careful readers, not a big name. She wrote compact, subtle novels. They are funny, but they are also dark. They are eloquent and clear, but also elusive and indirect. They leave a great deal unsaid. Whether she was drawing on the experiences of her own life – working for the BBC in the Blitz, helping to make a go of a small-town Suffolk bookshop, living on a leaky barge on the Thames in the 1960s, teaching children at a stage-school – or, in her last four great novels, going back in time and sometimes out of England to historical periods which she evoked with astonishing authenticity – she created whole worlds with striking economy. Her books inhabit a small space, but seem, magically, to reach out beyond it.

After her death at eighty-three, in 2000, there might have been a danger of this extraordinary voice fading away into silence and neglect. But she has been kept from oblivion by her executors and her admirers. The posthumous publication of her stories, essays and letters is now being followed by a biography (Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, by Hermione Lee, Chatto & Windus, 2013), and by these very welcome reissues of her work. The fine writers who have provided introductions to these new editions show what a distinguished following she has. I hope that many new readers will now discover, and fall in love with, the work of one of the most spellbinding English novelists of the twentieth century.

Introduction

Penelope Fitzgerald, in an all-too-short autobiographical piece entitled ‘Curriculum Vitae’, writes that she could ‘honestly say that I never shell peas in summer without thinking of Ruskin and of my grandfather’. That grandfather, like the one on her father’s side, was a bishop who ‘had started out with next to nothing’. He fell under the influence of Ruskin, who would describe, ‘with keenest relish’, the joy of shelling peas – ‘the pop which assures one of a successful start, the fresh colour and scent of the juicy row within, and the pleasure of skilfully scooping the bouncing peas with one’s thumb into the vessel by one’s side’.

That description embodies the physical processes, the mental sequence and, always present with Penelope Fitzgerald, the effect upon the spirit that come with the playing of a phrase in music, the resolution of a mathematical problem or the manufacture of a satisfactory sentence. It has, too, a strict regard for several forms of veracity: practical, felt, aesthetic, metaphorical.

Of herself, Penelope Fitzgerald writes in the same essay, ‘Well, those were my ancestors and I should like to have lived up to them. I should like to have been musical, I should like to be mathematical, and above all I should like never to have told a lie.’ It’s interesting that the verb form changes with the desire to be mathematical, as though there were more hope of that, as though she dismisses outright the other two, acknowledging truthfully the impossibility of true truthfulness. As for living up to them …

The Blue Flower (1995), her last novel, burdened often, and very often by other novelists, including this one, with words as inexact and lumpy as ‘masterpiece’ and ‘genius’, addresses the short shining transit of the life of the philosopher and poet Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), later to take the name Novalis, author of Hymns to the Night and of a novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, that contains mention of ‘the blue flower’, an idea of profound importance to the philosopher-poets of that mind-crowded time and place. He was author of much more, work that strives (to put it over-simply) to reconcile observable phenomena with a sublime principle.

‘Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language.’ These thoughts are put in the mind of Hardenberg by Fitzgerald, who discovers in this book something approaching that common language, in its poetry, its reason and its spirit.

The eldest of a large family, Hardenberg appeared at the start to be dull but turned out to be quite brilliant. His life was full of such flips of transfiguration, dark to light to dark again. This making light out of the dark is repeatedly effected by Fitzgerald, who has turned into this novel his, definingly Romantic, life. She has kept throughout a certain Germanness of diction, acutely listened out for rather than inserted: articles sit in front of some proper nouns; no word or phrase is offered in the German without setting a crumb-trail worth following.

Penelope Fitzgerald is a novelist who elevates her readers through teaching them how to read her. She freely offers her own great intelligence to all her readers, as to her humblest protagonist. Her approach to her material is interior, never merely the stretching of an aestheticised membrane over prefigured event. To see her manuscript is to confirm what the finished artefact has told us: in her rounded yet italic hand, each letter sits in its row like a bead on the abacus of straight thought, doing the exact work its position and character demands. The miracle is that these beads are also as alive as peas, to be sown and set, fertile, tender, reaching, tenacious, and when harvested and dried down as hard as hail throwing itself at the window in the reader’s head. She does not strew effect, uses shock sparingly and administers it – often violently – through silence, a woven veil or a sideways unrequited look.

Hardenberg’s position in the minor Saxon nobility of the late eighteenth century had limited opportunities. His family had estates, a household, a respectable allocation of linen, duties, a nag or two, habits of generosity; not money. The father was a devout adherent of the Moravian Church, a Christocentric group of a certain spiritual climate, dwelling (in the words of Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncle Ronald Knox) with monotonous sentimentalism, ‘only less distressing in German than in English’, on the wound in Christ’s side.

Other modes of thought, though, are stirring, and not far off. At Jena, one of the universities attended by Hardenberg, Goethe walks along in plain view, an old man of over forty. Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin lodge together. The philosopher Fichte and the Romantic Schlegel teach Hardenberg. Fichtieren, to romanticise Fichte-style, is a fashion among the students. At one point, there is a duelling accident. Two good-sized bits of finger are lopped off. Fritz’s medical student friend Dietmahler makes him carry the part-fingers for safekeeping in the ideal receptacle that is his mouth. One has a heavy ring. Can you unfeel that? The novelist has transmitted to the reader the very taste of subjectivity.

Hardenberg was sent to learn from Kreisamtmann Coelestin Just the business of overseeing the processes of the mining of salt, in order to make a living beyond that of the savourless life of a writer-scholar. By this point he already has the intermittent transformative sense that beauty is where it falls; that everything is illuminated.

Trying to assemble information for her projected life of L. P. Hartley, Penelope Fitzgerald interviewed Princess Clary, who said, ‘My dear, how can you write the life of a writer? If he had entered into politics, if he had commanded an army in warfare, but what life can a writer have?’

A chance visit, paid in the company of Just, to a family as large as his own but more prone to laughter, changed Fritz von Hardenberg’s life.

He fell in love with Sophie von Kuhn when she was twelve. We first see her, an ordinary enough girl, standing at a window wishing for something to happen, be it only a fall of snow.

We are given Sophie in full: she is impious, ordinary-looking, greedy, fond of fart and sex jokes. She has nice hair and dark eyes – like those of Raphael in the self-portrait he made at twenty-five. We never doubt her lover’s transforming serious love of and for her. We too come to see and to care, in the irrational incremental way of love. This short book induces in its reader many forms of the topple into love: with big families, with children, with ‘the one’, ‘the other’, with an idea, with thought, with nature.

The blue flower, signifying that elusive thing which can connect the individual self to an understanding of greater external existence, finds its equivalent in the novel which itself is a concrete rendering of the abstraction it contemplates. The Blue Flower constitutes for its reader a blue flower. Hardenberg came to call Sophie his Philosophy. This, to a novelist of such metaphysical mind, must have been a folding together of concept and embodiment impossible to resist.

‘As a hopelessly addicted writer of short books I have to try to see to it that every confrontation and every dialogue has some reference to what I hope will be understood as the heart of the novel,’ Penelope Fitzgerald writes, three years before her death. She is pinning the numberless stars in their places with each word written, and calling them each by their names. She is very clear here about why, but how does she see so feelingly – and set it down?

Penelope Fitzgerald was in the provident habit of unravelling and reknitting garments for her family (‘I have unpicked the famous red gloves and am knitting them up again for you!’ she writes to her daughter Maria in 1972). That curative use of ‘up’ is surely Shakespearean. And this ‘knitting up’ is what she does with her areas of preoccupation (it’s too simple to call it research) and her novels.

She embodies and suggests, giving a life to the physical such that it radiates metaphysically. Stars, in all their forms, are here, from dust (Novalis’s first book was Blutenstaub, that is Pollen, a rich dust) to light, through the stellar forms of snowflakes and the squarer salt crystals arriving under sunlight in low pans with the stealth of frost-flowers, the ‘sparkling chatter of the harpsichord’. Here is, also, the violent entropic subtraction of death in youth, leaving a burnt place behind in the creation – a bright star gone – the graphic bursting bark of a human cough never far away as the white death of consumption awaits within. Sentences capturing, describing, transmuting, extinguishing or measuring light (with cypress shadows) are equalled in number by those that describe darkness or concealment, either social or, dreadfully, anatomical, the dark of the body where tumours assemble themselves and the blood waits to declare itself on linen. This light into darkness, dark into light is a faithful mirroring by the novelist.

It is not fantastical or worked up, not ‘heightened’ at all, although a German for ‘imagination’ is Fantasie. In dealing with such matters it is hard to avoid a kind of tense, high, exalted note used by prose-technicians who may wish to ramp up mood or emotion. But in this novel, the increments by which we are led in these new lives through their autumn and ‘forewinter’ and tipped into a deep grief show a novelist and a character devoid of kitsch. She plucks life of its feathery detail, as with the geese at Tennstedt, stripped of their down alive twice before slaughter.

As Penelope Fitzgerald writes in Charlotte Mew and her Friends, ‘Terminal illness is a great simplifier of daily life, everything being reduced to the same point of hope against hope.’ That sense of intensified life we swear after disaster that we will cleave to, Fitzgerald manages to keep alive yet sweetly unhectic in her writing.

The very structure of the book is constellated. Each short chapter of the fifty-five works with what has been and what will be so that we see the unavoidability of what supervenes for each character, as we see stars where once they were; stars might be said to be, as we observe them, fictions. Because we understand more than we know ourselves to, on account of the work the author has done to hold us in perfect trust, we feel an accretive ache as each character moves towards her or his fate; suddenly we have ‘known all along’. When we reread, the urge to hold it back, as in life, beats stark. We are given to ‘know’ subconsciously what we cannot know with our whole mind because the novelist has fully imagined each person who arrives; each carries his fate, as we each do, within our own allotted time.

That these are people who have lived, who are not ‘made up’, is of less rather than more help to a novelist unless she be one of deep imagination and assimilated learning. Bones ground to make novelistic bread often stick in the reader’s craw. It is one of the objections dearly held by those who hold ‘historical novels’ in contempt. Some fun is had in this novel at the expense of those unimaginative self-designated realists who think that artists are tricksy prestidigitators.

Certain conditions prevail in The Blue Flower. Time is short. You may be betrothed at twice seven, worn out by nursing and marriage at three times seven, off the market at twenty-eight. Men, too, have a tight span in which to be and to act. New babies are born annually to married women; some, in the way of it, die. Pregnant women who are unmarried may visit the ‘Angel-Maker’ to resolve things. Angels offer annoyance or solace in fraternal or in spirit form. Fritz sees one such spirit and sometimes wishes he saw rather less of another angel more robust and accident-prone; he will get his undesired wish. As he has occasion later to say, ‘If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching.’

Children speak no pappy or truncated language here but utter their thoughts; there is no time for the approximations of baby talk in a world where revolution is massing in France, and Buonaparte is making himself felt. For Fritz’s six-year-old brother, ‘the Bernhard’, thought is blood, as Fitzgerald has it in The Gate of Angels.

The great are teased. In a world where linen is counted, Goethe has two overcoats on account of his fear of draughts and no small talk to spare even for the mortally sick Sophie von Kuhn, who is reduced to ‘venturing that Jena is a larger town than Grüningen’. Goethe is sententious and a bit creepy about Sophie to Fritz’s brother Erasmus. The great poet has forgotten perhaps the transformative nature of love, that can make of a potato-fed (or bread-and-butter-fed) girl of human clay a persisting star in the mind of a man. He cannot ‘read’ that it is not for Fritz, his brother, that Erasmus cares, but for Fritz’s intended, for he too has fallen in love with Sophie. There is love surplus and love unmet to twist the heart in this novel. The lonely consequence of sparing your loved one’s feelings are terribly demonstrated by Karoline Just, who gives life to a man who has never existed, to spare Hardenberg pain for not loving her as she loves him.